[MUD-Dev] Re: Recursive look

["Bruce Mitchener, Jr." <bruce#puremagic,com>]

Good evening,

On Wed, October 21, 1998, Marc Hernandez wrote:
> This brings up an interesting notion I was thinking about
>regarding sending messages in muds.  What I was thinking about was that
>instead of having the 'interface' to sending the client a simple
>sendText(clientID,"text") it could be based on a .. token system.
> There would be a set of tokens that would represent things
>(nouns/verbs probably).  To send something to the client you would then
>say something like:
>sendClient(clientID,tok_Leave(tok_Living(bob)));  Then the sendClient
>function would take care of stringing things together and making sentances
>out of them.
> The nice thing about it is that you could have something at
>sendClient that could manipulate messages in a logical manner since it
>would then be a function of legal operations on tokens, instead of parsing
>a passing string and figuring out some of this stuff.  The tokens can be
>well defined, unlike english.


Why not pass everything back to the client in this manner?  I'd previously
(http://www.kanga.nu/~petidomo/lists/mud-dev/1998Q3/msg00698.html) suggested
using a protocol described by an XML DTD, but it could even use MCP 2.1
(http://www.moo.mud.org/mcp/).  Tools exist to work with both of these
already.  My plans are to look at MUX from HTTP-NG and see if that would
suit my needs for a transport layer and then to send XML specified messages
on top of that.  I do know the author of a Mac based MUD client that, in
development versions, currently uses XML for internal things, with plans for
wider use of XML in the future.

> Also with the above system you could in theory defer
>interpretation until the tokens reach a client (perhaps there could be a
>light client for people that NEED to telnet in).


Or a proxy server that does a transformation from XML to plain text, much
like DSSSL tools do for SGML and so on.

I'm working with someone on getting a basic plan for the structure of a
system like this laid out and making sure it is extensible (XML namespaces).
Hopefully more soon.

 - Bruce