Of Markdown, REST, and others

As I’m working on my side project (You should probably watch it onGitHub to stroke my ego), I’ve been toying with how I’ll eventually handle colors and web content. I’m almost fully set against using MUX/MUSH color codes, as those don’t do the best job of handling where color starts/ends. They’re also not very friendly for web-based output.

I’ve been considering a few different approaches:

• Restructured Text
• HTML
• Something resembling customized BBcode

I really like Restructured Text, but am not quite sure how I’d substitute in the color sequences on the MUD side. HTML (or a subset of it) is possible, but I’m not sure this is a very clean solution. BBcode could work, and is probably the most simple to implement, but I wonder if it’d prove too limiting.

I’ll open this up to other MUD developers for commenting. How do you handle color in a way that plays nice with a variety of different clients/protocols (I’m very interested to hear how games that have both a Telnet and web-based service handle this).