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ArchPrime · 09-15-2010, 12:07 AM

I'm not advocating the creation of a universal mud protocol. We have one: telnet. ;-) We certainly do have a broad set of protocols to choose from. But, we do not have broad adoption of those protocols outside of telnet. I am referring to protocols like MXP/MSP/ATCP etc...

Er, yeah. I agree -- that's why I used the word "skinning" in an earlier post regarding components/widgets. ;-) It would be super neat if there was a skinning standard... a broadly accepted one.

Its a matter of broad adoption of things across multiple clients. Its not about what one or two existing clients can do. Why? Because I cannot guarantee what client a user is going to use(nor can I guarantee what plugin (s)he is going to use, given more than one plugin for a particular feature). Therefore, I cannot create an environment that is consistent throughout the playerbase. Web browsers used to be absolutely terrible in following standards -- now they are only somewhat terrible (and getting better!) But, at least they have some standards which developers can leverage and create cool things with. All without needing to create a plugin for IE, a hack for Chrome, another plugin for Safari, and yet another plugin for Mozilla ... just to implement a much desired DIV tag. Obviously my example is not real, but hopefully it illustrates the point.

Some of the things are so common (minimaps? health bars? login screens? inventories? menus?) that clients should probably provide standard and generic ways to instance, control and skin these widgets without needing people to write plugins. I think that if these things were broadly standardized, more people would code to them.

It would be super cool if clever game developers could write one set of standardized code to graphically render a minimap, status bars, a text output window/input bar, an inventory window, etc... and skin it all, and know that it would look, feel, and behave the same across all MUD clients(without being also required to write and maintain N plugins). If people turn off minimaps, whatever. At least I'd know the minimap would look the same for everyone who had it "on", regardless of what client they were in.

Broad adoption of the HTML/CSS standards would even go a looooong way. Any clients out there use webkit?

09-15-2010, 12:07 AM	#85
ArchPrime Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Home MUD: Archons of Avenshar Posts: 72	Re: The mud client poll I'm not advocating the creation of a universal mud protocol. We have one: telnet. ;-) We certainly do have a broad set of protocols to choose from. But, we do not have broad adoption of those protocols outside of telnet. I am referring to protocols like MXP/MSP/ATCP etc... Er, yeah. I agree -- that's why I used the word "skinning" in an earlier post regarding components/widgets. ;-) It would be super neat if there was a skinning standard... a broadly accepted one. Its a matter of broad adoption of things across multiple clients. Its not about what one or two existing clients can do. Why? Because I cannot guarantee what client a user is going to use(nor can I guarantee what plugin (s)he is going to use, given more than one plugin for a particular feature). Therefore, I cannot create an environment that is consistent throughout the playerbase. Web browsers used to be absolutely terrible in following standards -- now they are only somewhat terrible (and getting better!) But, at least they have some standards which developers can leverage and create cool things with. All without needing to create a plugin for IE, a hack for Chrome, another plugin for Safari, and yet another plugin for Mozilla ... just to implement a much desired DIV tag. Obviously my example is not real, but hopefully it illustrates the point. Some of the things are so common (minimaps? health bars? login screens? inventories? menus?) that clients should probably provide standard and generic ways to instance, control and skin these widgets without needing people to write plugins. I think that if these things were broadly standardized, more people would code to them. It would be super cool if clever game developers could write one set of standardized code to graphically render a minimap, status bars, a text output window/input bar, an inventory window, etc... and skin it all, and know that it would look, feel, and behave the same across all MUD clients(without being also required to write and maintain N plugins). If people turn off minimaps, whatever. At least I'd know the minimap would look the same for everyone who had it "on", regardless of what client they were in. Broad adoption of the HTML/CSS standards would even go a looooong way. Any clients out there use webkit?