[abathur]

This reminds me of what Apple does to the SMS/MMS ecosystem.

MUDs face a similar set of issues. Some new MUD frameworks skip over these by ignoring telnet and going HTML/JS.

There's an interesting third path, GMCP, which is basically treated by the server/client (once support is negotiated) as out-of-band communication. If either end can't negotiate support, you get the basic experience. As a pressure-release valve, options like this can be better than clients or servers trying to overload the primary protocol with magic messages that other servers/clients without support are still forced to digest and display.