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jhoechtl | 2 months ago

With sixel support finally comming to terminals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

we are full circle, 40 year later.

discuss

order

kragen|2 months ago

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|2 months ago

> Sixel support unfortunately came to terminals in 01988

Then why do I have it now? Time travel?

nineteen999|2 months ago

> 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.