Heh. I guess I never even noticed that. I just assumed it did, not sure why.

Are you opposed to MXP out of principle or because the implementation was so messy?

Lets just say I'm skeptical of its usefulness due to Zugg disobeying his own standard, turning it into the IE of the MUD world.

Yup. That's both my #1 and my major qualm with it. (The distinction might sound silly; what I mean is that it's my #1 qualm, and all the other qualms are a fair ways behind...) You might have inferred as much from what I've said on Nick's forums. Nonetheless I do find its hyperlinking useful for having shortcuts to complicated commands.

And again, if you've been following Nick's forums, I've been slowly advocating a new protocol, one that is much more based on the actual data being sent, as opposed to superficial details like what colors to display things in. Thing CSS or document styles vs. font tags. The idea is that you would not send pre-formatted information, but rather some kind of structured representation of the same, and you would let the client decide how to format it. The client could then take the exact same input and turn it into text, or use it to fill in pieces of a GUI. Well, anyhow, this might be a discussion for another day...

Sounds rather like pueblo, probably a better stricter sort of standard in the sense that the developers actually live up to their own standards.

Maybe AFK should be the testing grounds of a new standard (like said earlier)? or adaptation/merging/FUSSing of existing ones?

I do like it & do use it. It's grate as a player for those items who's descriptions are obscure and meaningless & you cant figure out how to junk/drop/etc.. and as said earlier it's grate for flagging & tagging things.

The problem with any such standard is that you need support in both the clients and the servers. It would be good if an MXP server-side implementation rigidly conformed to standards so as to not encourage clients to be sloppy; similarly it would be good if client-side implementations did the same thing and informed server writers that their code wasn't doing exactly the right thing.

Unfortunately there is a big bottleneck in all of this, one client in particular that has "bent" the standard such that many servers cater to that bent standard, not the actual one...

So in other words, because Zmud has been the IE of MUD clients, MXP has been more or less totally fubared? That would be about the extent of it from trying to support it with AFKMud

emote whines about mxp not being on alsherok already.

I do hope that mxp support (as is) will remain an option perhaps through cset or make options? (begs for middle ground) even if it's not developed further?

I remember there being MXP support on Alsherok.. did you by chance turn it off? Or maybe it was already ripped out.

I already pulled it out. Middle ground does little good when the support for it from the author is so awful.

Why not leave it in but just conform to the standard? ZMud can meet the standard, it's just that it also meets things that don't conform. But the advantage to meeting it is that clients like MUSHclient (that are sane) can benefit from it too...

The problem is, if you support the correct standard, people who connect with the incorrect client will pester you with "bug reports", since things don't look right to them.

One of my early attempts at doing contract work was to write the database logic in some PHP pages, which would later have pretty buttons and such added by the web designer. Well, it turned out the web designer couldn't actually READ PHP code, and thus had no clue how to integrate their artwork into my code. Sooo, they tried to get me to do it.

Long story short, I developed what I thought was a pretty solid page, simple and decent looking, following their directions and mockup page pretty close. As a n00b to web programming, I was using Firefox. It worked great. However, the page didn't line up properly in IE, and as you might expect, arguing that IE was wrong didn't go very far since "everyone" uses IE.

If MXP support stays, there will be people using the bastardized ZMud client will try to add features they know it supports from other games, and submit bug reports when they don't work. If it's possible to turn it into a snippet, that would probably be the best choice. That way individual admins can paste it back in, and if they want to extend it for the psuedo-standard, they know where to poke.

I thought the problem with MXP was the other way around: ZMud accepts things that it shouldn't, and so it "fixes" a bad server implementation. MUSHclient won't accept the bad MXP, and so MUSHclient appears broken. I wasn't under the impression that ZMud actually fails to respect correct MXP tags.

Quixadhal said:

If it's possible to turn it into a snippet, that would probably be the best choice.

I don't see why it should be a snippet and not just a toggle option in the settings... seems like it does no harm if it just sits there inactive, whereas having to go through installing snippets is tedious at best.

It was my experience that Zmud would actually break stuff on valid MXP that worked in Mushclient, Mudmagic's client, and Kmuddy. But that's a bit like valid HTML working in Firefox, Opera, and Safari only to have it not work in IE and have everyone tell you you did it wrong because IE isn't displaying it right. But I think Quixadhal already made that point.

Bottom line is that until Zmud pulls an IE8 and goes standards compliance on us, I'm not touching it.

DavidHaley said:

I don't see why it should be a snippet and not just a toggle option in the settings... seems like it does no harm if it just sits there inactive, whereas having to go through installing snippets is tedious at best.

Only because it removes to onus of support from the codebase maintainer. If MXP becomes a snippet, it drops to a category of being use-at-your-own-risk, and even allows someone else who feels the need to actively maintain that system to take over support.

Personally, I agree. However, I know there are some people who expect everything the driver ships with to work 100%, or they bug Samson about it being broken. I'm sure his inbox can tell that tale better than I.

Heh. My inbox sees very little of that sort of thing. The bug reports end up on the forums one way or another. I'd much rather leave crappy broken protocols out of the codebase. I kept MSP because it actually seems to work right. Zugg should have been more careful no to hose MXP.