Re: A good set of generic questions...

• Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 19:42:00 PDT
• From:
  Eric Mercer <mercer@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu>
• Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>  If you want to do something like this, why not use Pueblo?  The new
>version doesn't give you frame, it gives you actual separate windows, Allows
>for sound and pictures inline, does the scrolling you wish Netscape would
>do, and is basically a MUD client, that supports the use of HTML tags, with
>a few of its own.  The newer version, pueblo 1.09 beta (waiting for 2.0
>coming soon.) Allows for just about everything I could have thought of (so
>far ;)) for adding easy, and quick sound and graphics to a MOO.  Take a look
>at that one.
>
>  WWW Moo has always been a bit laggy, which pueblo doesn't suffer from,
>BTW.  I wouldn't even have considered using netscape as a client, but pueblo
>fits the bill well.

  Actually, this is sort of a funny thing.  Two of the earliest webbed MOOs
were the Sprawl and MOOtiny.  Both are on pretty laggy lines when connecting
from the U.S. (Sprawl server in Hawaii and MOOtiny in Britain) so webbed
MOOs got a reputation as being laggy.  They aren't.  Also, the Sprawl used
to be very populated, and having 100 connected users will lag your MOO more
than any web system.  Then again, some implementations have more potential
for lag if your MOO ever gets a few hundred web hits at once.
Implementations where every web transaction creates a new MOO object are
probably most vulnerable to this, since you're talking about a lot of server
overhead.
  Although I like some things about the Pueblo implementation (by the
company "Chaco"), and their "scrolling HTML" is kind of interesting, it has
three problems that I see. One, the client requires you to connect through
the Chaco server, which I view as a sneaky way for Chaco to set itself up as
the gateway to MOOs that don't belong to it, and also as a serious security
risk unless you don't mind the folks at Chaco having access to all your MOO
communications (do all client communications go through their server
first?).  Two, Unix and Mac users are left out in the cold because there is
no Pueblo client version for them.
  Three, you become dependent on the folks at Chaco to continue supporting
and upgrading their client.  We're talking about a company too small to put
out Mac and Unix releases and if they go under then your fancy webbed MOO is
suddenly a dinosaur.  They implement MOO-client communication through
several very unusual "x-command" attributes embedded into the HTML tags, and
there's never going to be any support for those outside Chaco, as far as I
can tell.  Web-MOO implementations that are browser independent, or at least
support both Netscape Navigator and MS Internet Explorer (90% of the people
out there use one or the other), are preferable because you then have
several multi-million dollar companies developing your MOO's client for you.
That's sort of nice.  Chaco has gone the route of discouraging compatibility
by implementing a system that really can't be reconciled with anything but
their own proprietary client.  I know retro is always sort of cool, but,
well, how 70's of them.
                                     Eric  (EricM at BioMOO and Diversity
University)
P.S. Yes, I'm dissing the competition. But I trust y'all are smart enough to
judge things based on their features in any case.  I look forward to hearing
a slick rebuttal soon.  :)

• Pueblo (was: A good set of generic questions)
• From: "Walter A. Aprile" <aprile@nl.cs.cmu.edu>
• Re: Webbed MOO
• From: Michael Brundage <anomaly@u.washington.edu>

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