[woodrowbarlow]

the downside of rich terminal output is that media formats become the system's responsibility. applications can't output media in formats that aren't provided by the system, because then the terminal wouldn't know how to display it and interop with other applications (e.g. piping) wouldn't work either.

[voldacar]

You could let a program create an API for manipulating a new type of data and inform the system about it so that other programs could use it. This is more or less what AmigaOS did; you installed a datatype for e.g. a PSD file, then all your programs that worked with images could read PSD files. I think it's a nice idea.