My point is that if you add too many features to an IRC client which have nothing to do with the IRC protocol or IRC itself at all, then you no longer have an IRC client. mIRC is an IRC client and always will be. So why try to make it into something else?
I would also submit that file transfers are different as they are not alternative methods of conversational communication.
- All you're doing here is pointing out that file transfers have far far less in common with IRC than audio/video chat, therefore meaning if you accept that as part of mIRC you should have no problem accepting something far more chat-relevant being added. DCC is a significant feature of IRC, and part of DCC is it's ability to stream audio/video content. mIRC supporting other IRC-centric chat-relevant features doesn't make it any less of an IRC client.
DCC is not a significant feature of IRC. It is a secondary feature supported by most or all of the well-known graphical IRC clients. It is in no way built into the protocol. The CTCP message sent to the other client to initiate a transfer is an arbitrary string which could have been anything, had the authors of IRC clients decided so.
It's also not chat-relevant, which is why I'm categorising it differently from audio/visual communication.
There's some bizarre link that people between audio/video chat and instant messengers. Limiting what mIRC can do because someone else happened to do it first makes no sense at all. Simply supporting similar features in mIRC's own way doesn't immediately mean that it's going to be infected with 'IM cooties'. I mean IMs also support text-chat, should we remove that from IRC aswell to further distance it from IM clients?
IRC was there first :P
