Assigning Materials to Curve objects? / Surfacing Curve Objects?

I’m confused on how to assign Materials to Curve objects, ie objects composed entirely of Curves.
Pictured are two duplicate objects: the red one has one material applied to it, while the blue one has one curve-node (is there a better term for this?) assigned to a different material:

The 2nd object (which is a duplicate of the first) looks exactly as if there were two objects in the same location, with z-fighting in the voids. What I was sort of expecting was that the entire object would change color to the 2nd color, OR, in a perfect world, there would be an interpolated surface color-ramp across the object.

So, how does one do surfacing on Curve Objects? tnx

It would seem that this is just a problem with 2D curves. 3D curves seem to treat per-spline materials correctly. But then they don’t fill like 2D curves do.

Not even sure if it’s a bug, seems like pretty old behavior (like, 2.49b old; anything earlier doesn’t run here :wink: ).