Since the article & the comment were about framebuffer terminals, in those cases, the base64 approach is superior: full color, built-in compression, no need to

Since the article & the comment were about framebuffer terminals, in those cases, the base64 approach is superior: full color, built-in compression, no need to pre-rasterize. For <= 16 simultaneous colors (like in the original DEC terminals) sixel is A-OK, and in certain cases, even preferable! But when I see people today dither images to 256 colors just to be able to excrete them to a soft terminal with sixel, I cringe. Something like Ascii85 or basE91 would have been even better, but beggars can't be choosers.