<HEAD><TITLE>discuss@charon: [92] in "Coldmud discussion meeting"</TITLE>
<H1>[92] in Coldmud discussion meeting</H1></HEAD>
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<HR><H2>Re: ANSI codes and unreadables</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sat Dec  4 13:43:15 1993
)</H3>
<PRE>
To: Andrew Wilson &lt;Andrew.Wilson@cm.cf.ac.uk&gt;
Cc: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 04 Dec 93 10:47:59 +0000.
             &lt;9312041047.AA00249@diamond.cm.cf.ac.uk&gt; 
Date: Sat, 04 Dec 93 13:37:00 EST
From: Greg Hudson &lt;ghudson@MIT.EDU&gt;


As Ian said, this debate shows up on r.g.m.* once a month or so.  I
will reiterate what I just recently posted there.  Here are the
reasons why it is a bad idea to handle presentation issues in the
server:

1. The server is not well-suited to know what kind of presentation
ability is available to the user's display, and what mechanisms should
be used to control the display.  On the other hand, the client is very
well-suited to that task.  The proposal which shows up on r.g.m.* and
now here is to allow the server to emit VT-100 codes; but not everyone
uses a VT-100 emulatorq, and many people have bitmapped graphic
displays which can handle far more powerful presentation.  A 70%
solution may seem okay to some people, but a design which limits you
to a 70% solution is never appropriate when a better design is
available.

2. Handling presentation issues in the server is inflexible.  Even if
everyone did have VT-100 emulators, people have different screen and
window sizes, and people may want things formatted differently.

3. Handling presentation issues in the server centralizes load, while
handling them in the client distributes load.

4. The existings popular clients, TF and VT, are line-oriented
clients, and are *not* well-adapted to visual formatting.  Neither are
emacs-based clients, and I suspect tintin isn't much better.

The appropriate solution is to design a client-oriented, intent-based
protocol, and then let people write clients to format the text however
they want.  Line-oriented clients could punt and display everything
without much presentation (VT could actually handle a little bit, such
as emphasis and centering, given a real protocol instead of VT-100
codes, which are a nightmare to parse out); newer clients could be
more sophisticated.  For more references, see jtext.

Someone suggested reading in unprintables from the text dump.  I don't
currently filter text dump input, so this is possible in 0.9.
However, I will fix this hole in 1.0.

I am not going to try to place any injunctions on people against
modifying the server, but I will not be at all pleased if people start
using coldmud to output raw terminal sequences.  I will also not be
pleased if people start handling multiple lines by sticking newlines
in the text rather than using lists of lines.

What about connecting to existing network services that don't stick to
printable ASCII?  That is a genuine problem.  I do not want to violate
the printable-text abstraction provided by strings, but sometimes you
want a raw-buffer abstraction instead.  What I may do is provide a
'buffer' type and some simple primitives for manipulating them, and
have connections put their text in a buffer.  User connections will
then generally convert the buffer into strings.  I'll think about
this.

--GBH

</PRE>
