ANSI art visualization in the browser has matured: meet Peter Nitsch‘s AS3-based ANSI Viewer.

He talks about it a bit more here. That work led him to create as3ansi, an ANSI parsing and visualization library for ActionScript 3. There’s a lot more about that here, with some sample code to illustrate; his event-driven ANSI parsing code is particularly awesome, considering the peculiarities the standard poses.

This may be hard to understand for people uninvolved with the underground BBS art scene around the 90’s, but for people who breathed that kind of 16-colored oxygen, seeing that come to life in a browser is wonderful – I spent a lot of time doing that and running a local ANSI art group, and heck, look at my business card. I’ve had my share of similar experiments about ANSI viewing in ActionScript in the past, but Peter’s work more than surpasses that. I can’t wait to see what the guys over at SixteenColors will make of it.