Will adding italic text REALLY make people's IRC experience that much richer? I suspect not...
Well let's see, let's take away all the colors, underline & bold,
the ability to play sound files, the perform on connect list, the
notify list & anything else you can think of that is not
necessary for a chat client to function and we'll see how
much richer of an experience you
had before you took
away all that stuff. 
