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[Mark Wedel]

tchize wrote:

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      I hope on #2 you are using the formatting features the GTK already has
     
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     built in.  If so, then it makes life much easier (it'd be really stupid to
     
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     have to write our own parser for that when GTK provides one for us)
     
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     working with gtk1, all i saw was samething called gtk-html, which is an
     
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     extension not include with the main gtk code, and i doubt it will work for
     
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     windows version :/
     
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     i choos to use something easy to handle (no closing tag, a tag just set a
     
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     value, there is no such thing as [normal]blabla[hand]foo-bar[/hand]other
     
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     blabla[/normal]
     
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     Parsing is quite straight forward anddoesn't involve complicated things.
     
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      I think I was looking at the pango parser:
     
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      http://www.gtk.org/api/2.6/pango/PangoMarkupFormat.html
      
      
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      This is a bit more complicated in its format, but then integrates very
     
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     simply into the client.
     
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      lib pango is gtk2, not gtk1. And the format is indeed more complicated. This 
     
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      sure simplifies to writing of gtk2 client, but it's a problem with other 
     
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      clients (gtk1, opengl client, sdl client).
     
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      Also there is a problem for fonts, i want 5 fonts to be availabe, 
     
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      corresponding to  normal text, hand written text, magical text, 
     
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      undecipherable text and fixed width text and the <span> attribute does not . 
     
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      I can't really see how the pango markup will be of help on that. Not to 
     
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      mention it has no support for including pictures in text.
     
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      Also, am not sure it's a good idea to have client/common have a permanent 
     
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      dependency on libPango
     
     
  Well, if pango was used, the dependency would probably be in the graphical 
area anyways.

  That said, pango may not be the best choice, however, in looking at it, it 
seemed to somewhat match html.

  However, thinking about this, perhaps xml is really the way to go.  Parsers 
are already out there, one can I believe write up the necessary description 
files so the data could even be displayed in web browsers.

  My real point here is to me, it makes no sense to come up with our own 
description language that then requires us to write our own parser for this.  We 
should use what is out there if we can - writing everything from anew just seems 
like a waste of effort and more of a maintenance pain.

xml would probably also be convenient in that new tags could be added, but the 
client should be able to pretty easily just ignore the tags it doesn't know 
about but still display the content.