stating that "not everyone has the ability to use itallics" is like saying "not everyone can afford a sports car". just because i can't afford a porche doesn't mean i'd stop you from having one.
why on earth do you care if itallics are added in? it's not like somebody will hold a gun to your head and make you use them. heck, with control-code stripping, you don't even have to see it if other people use it...
Well for the first part your analogy doesn't really work. Reason is when you drive a porche you are not interfering with my in my stationwagon. But when you use italics, and my client doesn't support it, it means I'm gonna see little "boxes" representing a character my client didn't realize was italics. So having it impairs my chatting experience.
As for your second point about stripping... yea it will render just about all control-code flood stoppers useless. And don't think the flooders won't realize this. $strip is generally used to test for the codes to ban. Well presumably a new flag 'i' would be added. All old scripts/bots would not have this flag and therefore until the problem is fixed people can control-flood easily.
Lastly the point people are making about an "irc standard" makes no sense so there is no point in talking about it. IRC is not standard, it was never accepted as a standard, and it probably never will be. But even if it was, the IRC protocol makes no mention of the contents of the messages sent between users, CTCP, color, bold, underline, etc, none of this is mentioned in RFC1459. They are all extensions added by clients.
