Forums Developers Emoticon Support via DLL?

Obviously this not a thread about the pro's and cons of emoticons in mIRC.

Also this is not a thread requesting a C++ tutorial.

Though I am genuinly interested to hear from fellow mIRC DLL programmers, About how conceptuallly, I should approach the very complex task of adding emoticon support to mIRC via a DLL.

Obviously I do not want to override mIRCs features. If I was happy with a sloppy implementation i would use a custom window+NHTML or a pic window or something else.

I am wanting to develop true emoticon support with perfect integration - This means none of mIRC's display and scripting features are overriden or 'relocated'.