overall reply:
I think at some point, mirc needs to break away from older clients so it can advance. It did it when breaking away from 16bit OS, it did it with codepages, and it's doing it with other things. Sticking to an antiquated standard just because it's the standard (and nobody cna agree on a new one) halts progress. This same argument was used for Italics and we have that now too. Personally, I think if mirc was the guiding light for colors, everybody else would quickly follow suit due to how popular the clieht has been for the past 20 years.
No, I don't code anything I need to support by millions and millions of users, but if I did, I would have the same approach, "In the future, here's how things will work. You have the choice of either upgrading (if you can), or staying where you are. In the case of colors and mirc, if it was me, I'd send a message, to all my registered users, with a website, which had a script that would work for older mirc's to take the new method and parse it back to the old method.
