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shadowfyr · 03-21-2007, 04:17 PM

Yeah. MXP implimentation has issues. Not the least of which being a) its hard to make a window that supports HTML type elements, like pictures, but still supports text positioning. The client I use didn't bother supporting *either*, since both where a pain to do. and b) if you follow specs, the muds might not, because sadly, zMud *doesn't* follow specs. At least with dealing with the translation of < and > to &lt and &gt. This causes a major pain if you decide to impliment error checking or capture of MXP tags. How do you tell if the stuff between < and > was *supposed* to be a tag, but something it wrong with it, or its just text, especially if the mud uses its own extensions to the protocol, which should logically be ignored, or its an element that is being sent in the tag? Simple, you can't. So you have two choices, a) delete the presumed tag and generate an error response through what ever system you have set up for that, or b) display it anyway, as though it was &ltblah&gt, which the specifications clearly indicate is actually wrong.

Nick Gammon, the creator of Mushclient and Zugg, who makes zMud have had a long conversation about this issue, which left off with Zugg saying, "Yeah, its probably a good idea to make sure everyone knows exactly what the standard behaviour *should* be in such cases.", then not doing anything at all to make the specifications clear about it, or changing zMud... The result is that *some* muds incorrectly impliment conversion, and in clients that treat bad or possible bad tags as errors, not plain text, those muds don't display right. Its just like HTML in IE vs. everyone else. Lets not follow a defined standard, lets just let the client *guess* what you really intended to have happen and hope the result isn't too screwed up in which ever browser you use... That worked so well for HTML after all that no browser in existence can or does display the test pages from the official specs properly. lol

Anyway. You need to be careful of these little annoyances. And in this case, doing it in a way that is technically correct will get you yelled at by mud developers, who are not following spec, but insist that just because everyone there uses zMud and zMud lets you funnel the bad parts into the box with the good ones, there is no good reason for "them" to fix the fact that you're being shipped a box of broken parts. Its quite annoying trying to talk to those people.

03-21-2007, 04:17 PM	#9
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Yeah. MXP implimentation has issues. Not the least of which being a) its hard to make a window that supports HTML type elements, like pictures, but still supports text positioning. The client I use didn't bother supporting either, since both where a pain to do. and b) if you follow specs, the muds might not, because sadly, zMud doesn't follow specs. At least with dealing with the translation of < and > to &lt and &gt. This causes a major pain if you decide to impliment error checking or capture of MXP tags. How do you tell if the stuff between < and > was supposed to be a tag, but something it wrong with it, or its just text, especially if the mud uses its own extensions to the protocol, which should logically be ignored, or its an element that is being sent in the tag? Simple, you can't. So you have two choices, a) delete the presumed tag and generate an error response through what ever system you have set up for that, or b) display it anyway, as though it was &ltblah&gt, which the specifications clearly indicate is actually wrong. Nick Gammon, the creator of Mushclient and Zugg, who makes zMud have had a long conversation about this issue, which left off with Zugg saying, "Yeah, its probably a good idea to make sure everyone knows exactly what the standard behaviour should be in such cases.", then not doing anything at all to make the specifications clear about it, or changing zMud... The result is that some muds incorrectly impliment conversion, and in clients that treat bad or possible bad tags as errors, not plain text, those muds don't display right. Its just like HTML in IE vs. everyone else. Lets not follow a defined standard, lets just let the client guess what you really intended to have happen and hope the result isn't too screwed up in which ever browser you use... That worked so well for HTML after all that no browser in existence can or does display the test pages from the official specs properly. lol Anyway. You need to be careful of these little annoyances. And in this case, doing it in a way that is technically correct will get you yelled at by mud developers, who are not following spec, but insist that just because everyone there uses zMud and zMud lets you funnel the bad parts into the box with the good ones, there is no good reason for "them" to fix the fact that you're being shipped a box of broken parts. Its quite annoying trying to talk to those people.