Not to completly disagree with you deku, but your argument is kinda week. As far as "As far as backwards compatibility is concerned... all the old mIRC users would see just a symbol that marks where italic begins and ends." What would there be as far as a "simble" in the text? Mirc currently uses ASCII characters as it is, and would just take another one to provide underline. Whatever character Khaled (if he does) used, it would display just as well as if he never added it at all.
"Might as well start adding graphical smilies too...."
Now you're referencing something that is enterpreted client side, with something that is sent over the server. If smilies were ever added, it wouldn't send .bmp|.gif|.jpg over the network, just a :[b][/b]-) like aim.
What you see:
<KingTomato> How's it going, everyone?
Sent to server:
PRIVMSG #somechan :How's it going, everyone?
So that argument is void.
Personally, i could care less if Italics were added, but kind of lean towards a yes. There are times where an italic would fit better than say reverse/bold/underline. Again, it would just take another char between 0-255 to enable "italic", so there wouldn't beany new "funky" characters to hide/show/watever.
