A new standard would also make it easier to fallback to no colors/decoration if the user wish so. At the moment, there is no way to do that without a flags or similar for each app. Even detecting if the terminal support colors is a pain.
I'm with you 100%, virtually nobody will take the time to code against a fallback profile like that. That's why most sites tend not to work without JavaScript regardless of whether their functionality strictly requires it.
Support for images concern many of us for that reason: sure it seems nice for a few cases used judiciously. But it feels counter-productive to the strengths of the CLI.
I would feel that way about curses/cli-based-gui too in theory, but in practice it's just top, vim, and less for the most part. Maybe I'm just too scared.
From what I've seen it's quite common to use a library to output those escape code. Given that, there is often a flag to disable all those colors/decoration at once without implementing a fallback specifically.
> Support for images concern many of us for that reason: sure it seems nice for a few cases used judiciously. But it feels counter-productive to the strengths of the CLI.
Of course those things should be used judiciously, but building CLI app on a broken standard only make it so much harder to build a quality app. You get a crappy end result just because it's difficult to do the "judiciously" part.
This means that it’s difficult to write a flashy app with bold text, links and images.
I like programs with minimal text ui, so I don’t mind.