I disagree that XML has no place within IRC.
HTTP + XML have proven to be a robust method of transfering structured data in both a human and machine readble form.
The idea behind adding to the IRC protocol stuff with XML would be not something which is forced down the necks of all IRC clients.
It would again work like a web browser - if your client doesn't know what
Services_URI:
http://servername.com:8080/services.xmlmeans, it would be simply displayed as part of teh MOTD.
RSS is a pretty good model for storing channel information such as topic, users, plus a few other 'smart' statistics about a channel - ie traffic volume, active users in last 5 minutes.
You could build a commercial server which directs clients to look at certain adverts - thus providing some income for the servers in advertising revenue. I could envision this similar to the advert banner in Opera. Channels could advertise themselves on the server, or even individual people if they wanted attention. This would provide a commercial input into IRC, something which it lacks at the moment (and which no doubt adds to its faltering use)
Are you familiar with winamp 3's skin system? I like the idea they have there of an XML based skin & component coupledc to a rendering engine - if IRC clients moved in this direction you could log onto a server and have a channel central, server commands, and all sorts dynamically built.
Also, having a 'service=dalnet' would be a bad idea, basically all it's done is mean the IRC client now has to somehow find out that information from DALnet.
Think about what your browser does when you visit a webpage - it applys some system default stylesheet to the webpage. If otherwise directed, it fetches from the server a stylesheet which goes on top of the system default.
Bigger networks could quite easily furnish their own services that could get bundled with Mirc... I can't imagine them coming it at anything bigger than 10kb. Surely, thats not unreasonable to expect a user to cache
If you think about how many plain text ugly commands exist within the IRC protocol, it kinda makes you shudder if you want to try and integrate new features. Right now its dead easy to include a google search, or the latest weather, or jsut about anythting on a web site via XML-RPC's.
Try doing that with IRC. You can't merge services in a uniform way and expect other servers to mirror your choices - leading to an ugly mish mash. Users don't know how to access stuff very well and have to remember 4 different basic command sets for every network.
If XML is overlapped onto an IRC server environment, think about all of the integration with other systems you could achieve. Web sites are by far the most popular medium for the web - so why not bring portions of web pages to irc.
