Parsers should abstract formatting

[csmith]

At the moment all formatting (colours and other styling) is done by the core.

This doesn't really make sense, as we implement IRC-specific logic. Ideally this should be pushed into the IRC parser, and the parser interfaces should expose some kind of backend-neutral rich text.

[ShaneMcC]

This sounds annoying! :(

[csmith]

Yup. But it means anything using the parser can't do styled text sanely without either borrowing DMDirc's styliser or defining their own constants/etc, which is a bit icky.

[ShaneMcC]

<Dataforce> Abstracting formatting seems quite irritating
<MD87> Yeah
<Dataforce> Only because I'm not sure how much should be actually formatted or not, eg some ircd's are stupid and allow colours in nicknames, but I wouldn't want to be running all the nicknames through a formatter before passing them to the client
<MD87> Oh yeah
<Dataforce> I guess the parser interface could have a styleiseString() method or so that people could use, and it just takes whatever input it gets and makes it rich, then the core can choose what it wants to style and what it doesn't
<MD87> I think the easiest thing would be to have something like parser.getFormatWriter() which is like a StringBuilder but has startBold() startStop() etc
<MD87> And the reverse
<MD87> Which is like what you just said :D