WeirdLooking.com: Michael Barton's Blog

i hate actionscript

2006-07-03T11:24:35Z

I needed to make a Flash movie containing pictures that could be dragged out onto the surrounding HTML elements. And it almost worked, too.

You can pass information from Flash to HTML by sending the browser to a javascript: URL, so the idea was to trap the mouse-down event in Flash, then pass a message to the javascript telling it that it’s currently in a dragging state. Replicate the dragging graphic in both Flash and HTML, and you can almost imagine this method working.

Except… if you try to drag something outside of Flash, it refuses to give the mouse events back. Flash continues receiving events though, so you could theoretically pass those back to the browser yourself. But calling getURL(’javascript:…’) to share the current mouse position causes IE to “click!” for every pixel the mouse moves.

I’m not really a Flash guy, so this may be possible via some other chicanery. But based on currently available data, I’m going to call it a defeat.

Mike: 0, Flash: 1

javascript mud client 2

2006-03-28T17:04:14Z

I woke up early this morning and decided to start from scratch on my javascript mud client. After writing the single worst implementation of a web server ever (it would have gone nicely with my networking final project, which included the single worst implementation of a web client ever), I was able to get it working.

Basically, I rewrote the MUD to accept HTTP requests and wrap a javascript call around the output from each pulse. Taking Matt's advice, I decided to use <b> tags with short class names, rather than the <span style=”color:…”> stuff I was doing before.

Example (mud prompt): <script>parent.push('<br><b class=g><20hp 100m 100mv> <b class=X>');</script>

The browser downloads this “page” inside a hidden <iframe> (using the hack I previously posted for Internet Explorer, just a plain iframe for FF). The push() function in the frame’s parent creates a new <pre> tag, stuffs the argument text inside it, then appends it to the display <div>. Then the div’s scroll is set to the bottom.

Mud input uses a form submit handler, which takes the value of the <input> and sticks it into an XMLHttpRequest, which is sent to the aforementioned worst web server implementation ever.

I hacked it into QuickMUD rather than my own code base so that, should I ever decide to clean it up, other people can use it.

Okay, so it’s pretty trivial. But it was fun.

web-based mud client?

2006-03-26T06:11:26Z

This blog post about Google’s web-based instant messaging is making the rounds:
http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=538

So here’s my thinking… If I can open up a second port on my mud and run a simple HTTP server on it (lots of people have done this already), I can pretty easily hack write_to_descriptor to send information to a persistent HTTP connection. In fact, it’ll practically be a regular mud connection except color codes and newlines and stuff will be parsed into their equivalent HTML (fairly straight-forward modification of the color code). And interpret will be called from an HTTP post. Then some work in javascript and I can have a web-based mud client.

I’ll have the first Web 2.0 mud.

assignment 7

2005-12-02T19:03:15Z

I’m unable to describe assignment 7, except to say I’m glad it’s 1998 again. True to the nature of the required scripts, I have made a Web page about my dog and also hosted it on geocities.

Most of my effort was put into re-implementing the “dragging clock” so that it works in both Firefox and IE. I haven’t gotten the dragging effect quite right, but I expect I will. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “a banner with scrolling text”, but I didn’t want to just write a poor man’s version of the marquee tag. So I made some text that moves along a sine wave — something I’m fairly sure marquees can’t do.

On the plus side, the semester is over in a week.