Emoticon Discussions

I see no benefit to graphical emoticons. Should it also have some graphic for brb, afk, and all the other lingo? They may even end up causing problems. To be honest I even have colors stripped for incoming messages since all the nuclear fruit cocktail like tags and such just annoy me. A significant number of irc users write code daily and process text based chat easily without bells, whistles and gongs. d:-|