"Alive again"??? IRC is very much alive and running well. It has a user base over most likely over a million people. Most of which do not care about it not have emoticons. It is not an IM client, but a full chat protocol and has been since it first came into being (long before Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers).
You can get scripts to do this sort of thing for yourself if you really want. For the rest of us, it's better without emoticons and avatars and such.
