David Haley said:
Xtian said:
David Haley: I don't agree that MUD shouldn't do colour formatting at all. The reason being: I want things to look good. If I need to have every player set a special colour to special tagged events himself, most of them won't bother to do this (because they will not get it or won't read the corresponding announcement, etc). It would be like saying every web-user should write his own default css-stylesheet.
On the other hand, if I define a default colour for the event -> well then we're doing colour-formatting again and will run into the problems mentioned above.
I think you might have kind of missed my point. I didn't mean that there should be no colors, nor did I say to make everything colorless by default and force players to set all the colors themselves. It's nothing like telling everybody to write their own stylesheet. It's like writing a bunch of stylesheets, and then letting them choose which one they want, and furthermore letting them customize it if they feel like it.
Basically this whole affair seems like quite a bit of overkill, when a simple question could be asked during creation (before you use any colors at all): "do you have a light or dark background?" From there, let them play more with colors using your provided schemes, and their ability to customize if they feel like it. In particular I believe that this statement is incorrect:
"So going from there to a fully automated procedure is a rather trivial step and not overcomplicated."
If it were trivial, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. It's not trivial, because now all clients need to be able to handle this negotiation. It's not trivial, because the client might report something, making the MUD server do something that the player didn't want. And so forth.
Creating standards that a whole pile of clients have to start respecting is never trivial, even if the basic idea is simple.