Re: Scramble boards

[Darse Billings <darse@cs.ualberta.ca>]

Aiiyah!  Please DO NOT BROADCAST large blocks of code and weird
data formats!  If you have a complex piece of information to share,
please provide a URL, so that the 95% of pbmserv-users who don't
care aren't forced to deal with pollution.


This is precisely the point.  All of this excessive detail should
be hidden from the users (and from the server!).

As Mark Hartwell pointed out, there is a simple and effective way
to provide as much eye candy as users could want, *without* adding
a lot of burden to the server.

The PBeM server sends and receives e-mail messages in plain text --
that is its job.  It can provide any text format to be used by a
different program, which can be as complex and convoluted as that
programmer wants to make it.

For example, have look at Dave Dyer's LoA viewer Java applet, at
www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/loa/ .  It converts a standard text
file format (.sgf) into beautiful images.  It is flexible, and can
provide a live board for web pages, among other things.  All the
server needs to do to use this facility is to have a -boardstyle
option that issues the game in .sgf format.

It is *simple* to write a program that converts one standard text
format to another standard format.  And by simple I don't mean
"relatively simple", which is short for a horribly complex mess.
A student or hobbiest can produce a perfect -boardstyle option,
eventually.  The more experienced volunteer programmers can do it
in a few hours, maybe less.

If you want to write a program that produces gifs, or bitmaps, or
vector images, or rooti-tooti mango tangerine 3-d graphics, fine,
but I don't want to see or hear about it on the _e-mail_ server!

							 - Darse.