You're far from wrong, but I would quibble with a couple of points. Specifically, IRC does support basic text formatting; I've written a client library [1] to i

You're far from wrong, but I would quibble with a couple of points. Specifically, IRC does support basic text formatting; I've written a client library [1] to implement it. It's not very comprehensive or at all well specified, though. Some clients can handle emoji, links, and images, but it is client-dependent. [1] https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el