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Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

drewdevault.com

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Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#21

Post by peterwwillis »

The idea of embedding links to multimedia is a good one. They just need to form an open standard for encoding media and rich text in text streams, and let clients parse the standard and decide how to format it. Text clients could remove any multimedia/rich text, GUI users could render it all, blind users would receive alt-tags in a way that's easily spoken by TTS, etc. Because it's a standard for encoding media in a text stream, you don't have to change the IRC protocol, just add a plugin to the client. You could even format it so the simplest clients could just strip everything but the text.

Something like:

  %M!i=//shrt.url/j3f87h38f;t=fr,bb;a=Kitten Mittens!
  Finally, there is an elegant, comfortable mitten for cats.
This indicates an image link, a text foreground color of red, text background color of black, and alt-text for the image as "Kitten Mittens". Any existing IRC client can simply remove everything from "%M!" to the "!" + newline, or if they don't, the text just shows up on its own line below the metadata, which isn't hard to read. You could even encode it in-line, such as "This is some %M!t=fr,b!text!." Harder to read if the client doesn't implement the standard, though.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#22

Post by johannes1234321 »

Spivak wrote: post #9
stefan_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean bootleg clients that will break randomly. Meanwhile a playing visible GIF in the official client still throttles a CPU core.

I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. I've been using wee-slack for a while now and I have very few complaints. I mean it's not IRC where the protocol is etched on stone tablets but Slack has been thus far a good steward of their API.

The difference is that the IRC standard is decades old and stable and made for "independent" clients.

Slack is Young and evolving and driven by a single company which wants to push their client

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#23

Post by Athas »

slezyr wrote: post #19

> IRC messages are always lines of characters terminated with a CR-LF (Carriage Return - Line Feed) pair, and these messages shall not exceed 512 characters in length, counting all characters including the trailing CR-LF. Thus, there are 510 characters maximum allowed for the command and its parameters. Yeah, lets just forget how painful it was for non english speaking users to use IRC. 255 characters for unicode and…

I remember when this was a significant problem but with the rise of UTF-8 it is less so (even if that is strictly against the letter of the spec, it works fine in practice). Are there languages where the 510 bytes per message are a significant limitation?

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#24

Post by est31 »

Spivak wrote: post #9
stefan_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean bootleg clients that will break randomly. Meanwhile a playing visible GIF in the official client still throttles a CPU core.

I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. I've been using wee-slack for a while now and I have very few complaints. I mean it's not IRC where the protocol is etched on stone tablets but Slack has been thus far a good steward of their API.

> I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad.

The difference between IRC and Slack is that IRC is seen as a standard protocol while for Slack the network protocol is an inofficial implementation detail and any use other than of the official client is unsupported. I'm not very familiar with Slack, but I've heard about Whatsapp users being banned just for the crime of using an alternative client. That's the difference between an open protocol and a proprietary one.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#25

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

walrus01 wrote: post #12
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.

And even more so to the point, you can't self host slack and have absolute root level to the OS it's running on admin control. For somebody who knows what's they're doing it takes maybe 45 minutes to set up a basic ircd-hybrid daemon on Debian or centos.

If you use a high level language like Python you could almost write an IRC server in 45 minutes.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#27

Post by est31 »

outime wrote: post #14
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.

I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands. Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example: * Use Slack on an ancient computer * Use TTS systems * Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel) * Not have link previews * Use keyboard only * Get a less distracting experience I'm…

They can crack down on alternative clients at any time they want. You are living on borrowed time. A guest who is wild camping in their gated community walled garden private property.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#28

Post by eeZah7Ux »

outime wrote: post #14
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.

I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands. Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example: * Use Slack on an ancient computer * Use TTS systems * Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel) * Not have link previews * Use keyboard only * Get a less distracting experience I'm…

You just described 6 use cases for IRC. Then I'll just stay on IRC.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#29

Post by outime »

est31 wrote: post #27
outime wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands. Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example: * Use Slack on an ancient computer * Use TTS systems * Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel) * Not have link previews * Use keyboard only * Get a less distracting experience I'm…

They can crack down on alternative clients at any time they want. You are living on borrowed time. A guest who is wild camping in their gated community walled garden private property.

I also agree with you. It was painful when e.g. Twitter basically killed 3rd party apps.

What happens here is that I don’t see any significant portion of Slack users moving to IRC anytime soon. Therefore, if you’re forced to use Slack, you should know that alternative clients are available as of today.

Re: Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

#30

Post by emptyparadise »

Formatting is pure fluff - it's convenient to have bold/italic/spoiler/code tags, and it is possible to implement them in a TUI without degrading anybody's experience. Link tags are not really necessary and a lot of clients don't even have them.

The image upload thing, though, the convenience there is being able to just upload an image directly into the client, rather than having to deal with some external service. That's it. There isn't much preventing this from being implemented in an IRC client.

Character limits are silly and should be removed - enforce them with a moderation bot if you really have to.

Just because most modern chat services are Electron trash does not mean we should throw out every bit of convenience learned. IRC (clients) could stand to gain better text formatting and file sharing options - things that make life easier for users, and in most cases don't really affect how the actual protocol works.

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