On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Bill Forgette wrote:
> In my opinion, it would be productive to do that to make things
> conform to being standard, but I feel that is highly unrealistic given
> the number of clients (either mud clients or telnet apps) out there
> that player use. Yes you could just focus on the few popular ones,
> but someone would always be left out.
And what's your point? Changing CircleMUD to be non-compliant isn't the
silver bullet you think it is. Then any client that doesn't handle the
non-compliance is SOL, and, even further, we can't even say, "Well, read
the standards before pretending to implement them; it's not our fault."
It's not unrealistic to ask people to upgrade their clients. They do it
all the time.
> This feeling of mine is due from experience of working with multiple
> software vendors who implement standards in their projects - i.e.
> Z39.50. All claim to follow the standard but it is a pain to get one
> server from company x using Z3950 to talk to company y using Z3950.
> Both will claim to follow the standard and blame the other for not
> following
So would you then ask that all developers converge on an implementation
outside of that specified and designed by Z39.50? And then when someone
comes along and correctly implements the standard and discovers that his
product doesn't work as specified with existing implementations? You're
not solving the problem by moving away from the standard -- you're pulling
the wool over the eyes of the users because, frankly, you want to give up
on strong-arming client developers before we've even began strong-arming
them. Dropping standards compliance is not the silver bullet you seem to
think it is, and just as I wouldn't preach everyone use only Newtonian
physics because it gained much wider acceptance before more correct models
appeared, I won't preach CircleMUD take a step back for the bugs in other
software. I cannot condone breaking CircleMUD for their sake, and I won't
be a part of that. In the meantime, send me a list of all the broken
clients, and I'll contact everyone I can.
It's agreed that it's very difficult to get conformance out of every
developer. However, we're not asking for them to implement the entire
TELNET protocol correctly (well, I would like it if CircleMUD implemented
it and they followed suit, but that's another matter), just change one
little thing in their handling of the TELNET command parsing. If they
choose non-compliance over correctness, that's their gig -- you'll just
have to get a client that works right.
-dak
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