[100] in Coldmud discussion meeting

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Re: ANSI etc

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sat Dec 4 17:18:51 1993 )

To: Lynx <BRANDON@cc.usu.edu>
Cc: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 Dec 1993 14:13:58 CST."
             <01H631TC66FCANYI4O@cc.usu.edu> 
Date: Sat, 04 Dec 1993 13:50:20 -0800
From: Ian McCloghrie <imcclogh@cs.ucsd.edu>

> > Note that Greg has not volunteered himself to be the protocol
> > designer; this is wise, given that it's the sort of project that would
> > end up taking a large amount of time. 
> 
> Exactly, which is why it makes no sense whatsoever to NOT use an established
> standard which works perfectly fine--IF there is nobody working on creating a

	Sure.  But vt100/ansi escape codes do NOT work "perfectly
fine".  They're a pain to parse, especially as they don't convey
intent, but a specific means to achieve that intent.  It's like
trying to distribute a program as assembly instead of c code,
possible, but not a good idea.

> standard.  So a few clients may wrap a little soon, BFD--turn off graphics

	'a few'?  try 'all'.  and 'a little soon' may turn into
wrapping after 10 characters if you drop enough escape codes in
there.  IMHO, you'll find very few people interested in giving up
everything tinyfugue does for you so as to be able to see your nifty
ansi graphics.

>mode.  My argument lies in that there IS no standard to follow, if there is, or
> will be soon, I would be more than happy to use it and completely forget about
> ANSI codes.  But I dont see one coming up soon, and I enjoy toying with ansi
> codes, so I would like the capability in the server...

	ANSI codes are not a solution, no matter what the PC BBS
community may think of them.  I would guess that less than half the
people on a random mud have ANSI color display capabilites on their
terminals.  If you want to give the server the capability of attaching
extra information to the text it's sending, do it in a broad spectrum,
general way, NOT by hacking in something display-specific, and limited
like vt100/ansi escape codes.

--
 /~> Ian McCloghrie      | Commandant of Secret Police - Cal Animage Beta.
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