[kragen]

Sixel support unfortunately came to terminals in 01988, as that page explains. I saw it myself in 01992. Sending uncompressed color raster data over a 9600-baud serial link again every time you wanted to look at it was a terrible idea, made worse by the stupid Sixel encoding inflating it by an additional 33%.

Today, when we're sending it to terminal emulators running on teraflops supercomputers over gigabit-per-second links, it's only a waste of CPU and software complexity instead of user time and precious bandwidth. But it's still a waste.

Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers instead?

[msla]

> Sixel support unfortunately came to terminals in 01988

Then why do I have it now? Time travel?

[nineteen999]

> Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers instead?

I mean not really, they are ancient and horribly insecure protocols without enough users to justify improving them.

[kragen]

I don't think they needed improving in order to continue accessing the existing sites that still used them.

Also, you may not have noticed this, but you're commenting on a thread that's largely about PETSCII and Videotex.

Fortunately, AFAIK, there isn't any significant body of existing Sixel art we need to preserve access to.

[nineteen999]

> I don't think they needed improving in order to continue accessing the existing sites that still used them

The browser support would have need continous security fixes and rewrites unfortunately, the protocol specs and the code was written in the day and age of a much less adversarial internet. It's much safer to handle those sort of protocols with a HTTPS proxy on the front these days. There's dedicated gopher and ftp clients still out there, IMHO browsers are too big and bloated as they are they need more stuff taken out of them, not more added without taking anything away, particularly stuff thats old and insecure and not used much anymore.

And yes, I'm also here for the retro factor :-) my pet project is Z80/6502 emulation in UnrealEngine with VT100 and VGA support and running BBS's in space. So I'm all over stuff about old ANSI, PETSCII and anything even tangentially 8x8 character set related:

https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png

https://i.imgur.com/DlftREp.png

[kragen]

I think it had been many years since the FTP code had needed a security fix, and at least a year or two for the Gopher code.

The entire original point of the WWW project was, approximately, providing a better user interface for accessing files on FTP servers. So to me it seems perverse that the current stewards of the Web have broken that.