Obviously I was talking about a single command. Such a method could just as easily be applied throughout mIRC in any command or event that can be used locally. There is no reason why RGB can't be made to work locally. It absolutely can. Yes, it will require work, but it can be done. Besides, the switch was just one option. Using some kind of identifier would work as well as I mentioned. mIRC could even let a remote user include the identifier and then display the right colors locally so that it was possible to send any color to someone who has a newer mIRC. Obviously, if other users who don't have the newest mIRC see it, they will see the identifier, but that would be completely up to the sender if they wanted to do that. Sending the identifier could be disabled by default, allowing a user to enable it if they want to send it. If they know everyone in the channel has a new version of mIRC, they could enable it and everyone could send any colors they wanted and everyone could see them. If they were in a channel where most aren't using a new enough version of mIRC, they can leave it disabled. That's just a side option that could be done to make it even more useful without suddenly having a lot of "messed up" text being sent to channels. Or, if there are any available CTRL codes, one of them can be used instead of Ctrl-K for setting colors and that code would always refer to RGB like you mentioned. Sure, rendering is a problem, but when it comes down to it, people are doing just fine scripting right now regardless of the rendering problem. It's not ideal, but it does work fine.
Logging should be changed anyhow. There should be an option to strip all codes and then you can open the logs in Notepad if you want, but if you allow codes, it should save in a format like RTF or something similar, where the codes are replaced with real formatting information. Then, you can open the logs in a word processor and see all formatting. It also lets you log any kind of color or formatting and load it back into mIRC without the slightest problem.
Why would you need to mix syntax? If I want a color from the palette, I can just use the RGB version of it. I'd expect with RGB enabled that you can have some kind of color wheel or similar to use and the standard palette colors should be included so you can click on them and their RGB information would be easily available.
And as far as your on TEXT example, we are talking about local display. on TEXT wouldn't even have to look for any kind of RGB if it's entirely local. You would assume the text coming in is palette-based. Then, if you wanted to adjust colors to RGB, you can halt it and echo the way you want.
However it is done, it definitely can be done. And there is no reason to think that multiple colors on a line are not possible or too difficult. No, adding RGB wouldn't be simple and easy. But neither was Unicode. Unicode took a year or more to do. Maybe RGB will take many months to do, but it can definitely be done.
Personally, I'd rather add scriptable image support to channels/queries first. Then people can script emoticons into their clients and others can use it for displaying things like warning images on errors or whatever else they might want to display for a local theme. But I wouldn't be surprised at all to see RGB in mIRC somewhere down the road.
