JdeBP

I think that you need to re-read "escape sequences" and "American National Standards Institute" a few more times until it clicks that these are two entirely different noun phrases.

Then you need to learn a lot more about control sequences.

You can start with CSI, value 0x009B, not being an ASCII character. Then proceed to ITU T.416 (ISO 8613-6) where the SGR control sequences for indexed and direct RGB colours are standardized. Then you can learn that the "E" in ECMA-48 does not stand for "ANSI", but for "European". And finally you can discover that ECMA-48 standardizes exactly 8 colours. 16 colour SGR sequences beloved of CGA-like and VGA-like art are not in the standards and are in fact the product of IBM's AIXterm.

You are looking at the wrong one. Look at /rescue/vi .

"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.

Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.

If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.

Oh, it really wasn't. If you want the terrible reality, start with how FidoNet CHARSET and CHRS 'kludge lines' tried to make this work.

There definitely was, and still is. Copyright is not defined by the presence of a "(C)", a "(c)", or even a "©" in some text. What the ASCII/ANSI Art world did not have was a culture of litigiousness. People rarely even made a fuss over copying. In part this was because the whole mechanism that got the art distributed to its viewership involved huge amounts of breaches of then copyright law.

(The legal frameworks that allowed computer systems to be exempt from copyright restrictions, if they were just making copies in the ordinary course of transmitting things around computer networks, did not exist until the turn of the 21st century. Under U.K. law, for example, the way that the WWW worked was technically a massive violation of copyright until The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 came along.)

The law was not different. People's attitudes were.

We tried that in the 1980s with MS/PC/DR-DOS and code pages. We also had BBS networks where people shared such files around the world. One language per file turned out to be a bad idea.

I made two additional wrong guesses, the Advanced RISC Computer class of machine firmware and the file archiving utility from System Enhancement Associates. (-:

(Back when the headline was "Arc is Sunsetting". I am so 2 minutes ago.)