IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things lik

IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things like `/me` or formatting codes (colour/bold/etc), and even the non-IETF specs that cover those things aren't necessarily reliable (the CTCP spec has a whole thing about how to encode metacharacters in payloads that in practice everybody ignores). At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.