Sure it's standardized enough to generally work but to my knowledge only RFC1459 is widely seen as authoritative. The protocol evolved quite a bit over the year

Sure it's standardized enough to generally work but to my knowledge only RFC1459 is widely seen as authoritative. The protocol evolved quite a bit over the years but a lot of the extensions covered (and maybe not covered) by those later RFCs are handled to some extent differently between IRCd implementations. There at least seems to be some effort [1] now to fix some of IRCs issues and bring the whole mess more in line again. As IRC is still widely used and probably there to stay I hope it will work out. [1] http://ircv3.net http://ircv3.net