While a little more consistency with the edge cases would be nice, it wouldn’t make sense for the basic ANSI colours to be exactly the same on all terminals. It’s a sort of hand-wavey palette with things like “red” and “cyan” in it, which can easily be themed. Individual configurations may vary, and I don’t think that’s at all “shocking”.
This article, for example, is talking about “black on white”. Is that true black on true white? Maybe. It’s pretty common to use a lower contrast ratio to reduce eye-strain, and that’s even more true for light on dark. If the colours were all exactly the same, which would they be tuned for? On what kind of display? Are the same colours going to really seem the “same” on top of hard black on an OLED display vs almost-black on a TFT? No.
It seems that what this article is actually saying is that xterm is not very pretty out of the box, and… well, yeah? There have been efforts to somewhat standardize palettes over the years, like Tango, or other options that are pretty common to see built-in to things like Solarized, but if all terminals had to have the same consistent colours, then they would all have to look like the default xterm palette described here, and the whole point of the article is essentially that it’s bad.
While a little more consistency with the edge cases would be nice, it wouldn’t make sense for the basic ANSI colours to be exactly the same on all terminals. It’s a sort of hand-wavey palette with things like “red” and “cyan” in it, which can easily be themed. Individual configurations may vary, and I don’t think that’s at all “shocking”.
This article, for example, is talking about “black on white”. Is that true black on true white? Maybe. It’s pretty common to use a lower contrast ratio to reduce eye-strain, and that’s even more true for light on dark. If the colours were all exactly the same, which would they be tuned for? On what kind of display? Are the same colours going to really seem the “same” on top of hard black on an OLED display vs almost-black on a TFT? No.
It seems that what this article is actually saying is that xterm is not very pretty out of the box, and… well, yeah? There have been efforts to somewhat standardize palettes over the years, like Tango, or other options that are pretty common to see built-in to things like Solarized, but if all terminals had to have the same consistent colours, then they would all have to look like the default xterm palette described here, and the whole point of the article is essentially that it’s bad.