Well, remote or local doesn't really matter, it's going to equate to a lot of visual noise. You still end up with 8x the data to represent the same thing.
This might be subjective, but I'd bet most people would agree that the syntax you just showed is uglier than the current system. In fact, all you end up doing is introducing yet another syntax that people have to deal with.. an extremely verbose one. Part of the reason Khaled chose control codes over the already existing ANSI codes that other IRC clients supported was for their simplicity and brevity. Even ANSI codes take up less space than your suggested syntax (by a factor of ~2), and Khaled thought even that was too verbose. Not to mention you still have to deal with how someone would be able to express the literal '<color="something">' value in a message.
