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shadowfyr · 01-19-2004, 05:05 PM

My view on this is a) ANSI isn't good enough and b) you should limit it to when it makes sense.

I wouldn't mind seeing someone use MXP more for reasonable situations. If you see a room full of flowers, and some of them are something like a Japanese Sky-Flower, then if they do:

look skyflower

it would makes sense to be able to actually show them what you mean. This may not be reasonable in some cases, but it would be a lot nicer than the eye straining tendency of people that use MXP only to all underlines to words that would be hard enough crammed together without decent spacing. Yes there *could* be a legitimate use for color, if you had more than just the basic ANSI colors and you provided them only when the user specifically looked at the items. But even then, unless you use some sort of color swatch type thing, coloring the word would tend to be more annoying than useful, especially if the contrast between the other color and the words color is extreme (which all ANSI colors are capable of).

Sadly the color swatch idea isn't practical. While Lucida contains a set of character common to the original OEM character set used in DOS mode, and those extended characters provided blocks of various kinds that let you build primitive images, in Lucida there only exist in the unicode block. This means that most clients not only can't display them, there is also no real way to tell the clients that do that you plan to use unicode characters.

All in all, I have to say that coloring a single word will sadly probably be more annoying than useful, unless it is a warning message or something designed to have major impact. At most, looking at a sign painted in green, all words need to be green. A sign with a warning *may* make sense to have the title in red and the rest normal, but things like the green sword someone mentioned.... not a good idea imho. It has to make sense, not just be an attempt to dress up things with colors that have always been too limited for such a task from the very beginning.

01-19-2004, 05:05 PM	#9
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	My view on this is a) ANSI isn't good enough and b) you should limit it to when it makes sense. I wouldn't mind seeing someone use MXP more for reasonable situations. If you see a room full of flowers, and some of them are something like a Japanese Sky-Flower, then if they do: look skyflower it would makes sense to be able to actually show them what you mean. This may not be reasonable in some cases, but it would be a lot nicer than the eye straining tendency of people that use MXP only to all underlines to words that would be hard enough crammed together without decent spacing. Yes there could be a legitimate use for color, if you had more than just the basic ANSI colors and you provided them only when the user specifically looked at the items. But even then, unless you use some sort of color swatch type thing, coloring the word would tend to be more annoying than useful, especially if the contrast between the other color and the words color is extreme (which all ANSI colors are capable of). Sadly the color swatch idea isn't practical. While Lucida contains a set of character common to the original OEM character set used in DOS mode, and those extended characters provided blocks of various kinds that let you build primitive images, in Lucida there only exist in the unicode block. This means that most clients not only can't display them, there is also no real way to tell the clients that do that you plan to use unicode characters. All in all, I have to say that coloring a single word will sadly probably be more annoying than useful, unless it is a warning message or something designed to have major impact. At most, looking at a sign painted in green, all words need to be green. A sign with a warning may make sense to have the title in red and the rest normal, but things like the green sword someone mentioned.... not a good idea imho. It has to make sense, not just be an attempt to dress up things with colors that have always been too limited for such a task from the very beginning.