21 Jun, 2009, elanthis wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
One thing I've always disliked about MUDs is the need for the server to do all formatting. That's hard, especially when using non-English text. Trying to calculate the display width of a string is very hard when you have extra-wide or zero-width characters in the strong, and the display width can't even be calculated accurately when using variable-width fonts (there's no way for the server to know exactly how the client will render any variable-width font unless it is using the exact same fonts, same layout engine, and same settings).

Making clients do word wrapping solves most of those issues, with the exception of table-like layouts. Pretty common in character sheet displays and the like, and also used here and there for certain MUDs' room displays with built-in minimaps.

So… what would a table layout ZMP command need to provide? How complex should it be in terms of requirements on the client end? HTML tables, even without things like border styling and the like, are pretty complex beasts, given that the client is expected to automatically determine the proper widths for each column and row. It requires the client receiving the entire table contents before it tries to do any layout (or that it recalculate layout as more of the table contents are received, and re-render the display). Fixed-width columns assist greatly in this regard, but have a disadvantage in that the server must now have some idea as to how wide the text in each column will be (which again is near impossible with variable-width fonts).

And then there's the issue of cells that span multiple columns or rows.

I'm thinking of a simple table structure that does not allow any spanning and which uses fixed-widths, specified either in character cells or in percentages (no other units).

Does that seem useful to anyone else? Is it too restrictive? Are any client authors interested in doing the work it would take to implement such a feature in their clients?
21 Jun, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Not having cell spanning can make things pretty awkward. As for variable-width fonts, I think that's pretty far outside of most MUDs, right? So maybe we don't need to worry about it too much. If you start laying things out with variable-width fonts, everything gets really complicated really fast and you quickly need some kind of markup language to describe where things go. I'd vote for staying with fixed-width, for now at least.
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