lets make the DOM renderer great again

[jerch]

The DOM renderer needs some love. It kinda fell behind and still misses some flags like INVISIBLE, BLINK and DIM. Furthermore we might want to investigate if we can speedup things by less <span>ning.

[Tyriar]

None of them support blink, too much work for something that is rarely used and an accessibility nightmare.

[jerch]

@Tyriar Tbh Im not aware of single terminal program in the last 20ys that uses blinking for some important feature. I think Turbo Pascal under DOS had some blinking animation after compiling or when an error was found, cannot remember exactly. 😄
Still for the cursor blinking it quite common, it can be done with a CSS animation quite easy.

[theflyingape]

The flash/blink attribute was an original DIGITAL terminal favorite of mine:

• VT100 it was more known as FLASH, as it toggled the characters on/off
• VT220 it was BLINK, as it toggled between states: BOLD/NORMAL, NORMAL/FAINT, FAINT/INVISIBLE
  ... and then there is the PROTECT flag (DECSCA) too.

I agree with @Tyriar for the reasons listed, but having those available for ANSI art, MUD clients, whatever, are often left wanting in a terminal emulator.

Is there a middle-ground? Could this be accomplished as add-on goal with its extended CSI handling?

[jerch]

Hmm maybe we should hide it behind some option? I see a reason to be able to completely disable it, blinking often annoys ppl.
Edit: With a custom CSI handler alone it cannot be done as it requires patches on renderer side as well. Currently no renderer offers this feature (wasnt even aware of that lol).

[Tyriar]

Custom CSI handler + #1852 would probably make it possible.

[Tyriar]

Most of this is done now thanks for community contributions 🎉, let's close this off and create issues for any remaining lack of functionality. Initially the DOM renderer was just the fallback but it will likely be the default in the future and users will be able to opt in to using GPU acceleration with the webgl renderer, so it should be just as solid as the others 💪