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To put in my two cents... I remember long ago, in a reality far far away, a time people used to dial in using modems to some strange device called a BBS. It was amazing, most clients that where not pure junk would recieve a simlple 'can do ANSI?' request and reply with a 'will do ANSI' sequence of there own and no one ever had to worry about if the end user even had a clue what it bloody was. It would just end up in color.
Now, jump forward 10 years or so and we are using TCP/IP, Telnet, HTML, etc, etc. and most muds either ask the user if they want color or force them to execute a command like 'term on' to enable it. WTF? If someone wants to turn off color, then great. Otherwise why not use the existing ANSI negotiation sequence that has been around since the days of 4800baud modems to ask the client if it handles it and turn it on automatically.
The benefit is obvious, if the client works right they user will just end up seeing stuff in color. If the client's ANSI implimentation is actually broken, all you see is a few odd characters during the negotiation and the mud sends plain text after that. For the life of me, I don't get why this is so hard to do, but no one uses it. Is every Telnet application in existance actually broken and can't respond to the sequence? So much for progress if that is the case. What will be next, start making web servers that refuse to send HTML until you send a message to activate it for your specific IP?
Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, but I find it plain silly...
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