Well, I think the argument is to increase the number of people who do use IRC - I'd say that Slack has proved people want features like that. If existing IRC users don't want to use the features, they don't have to.
why wouldn't they be? svgalib and directfb allow irssi to display avatars in full color. You could use libcaca to reduce them down to ascii, if needed.
Either way, the point of an extension is that it degrades gracefully if the extension is not supported. Users that can see avatars get to see avatars. the ones that don't care don't lose the rest of the experience.
>why wouldn't they be? svgalib and directfb allow irssi to display avatars in full color. You could use libcaca to reduce them down to ascii, if needed.
Yes for both of the people running irssi in a framebuffer console, libcaca would obviously need ridiculously large avatars.
>Either way, the point of an extension is that it degrades gracefully if the extension is not supported. Users that can see avatars get to see avatars. the ones that don't care don't lose the rest of the experience.
Yeah, but the ones that do don't see any avatars either, because they're the only ones that support it.
jwheare2 keeps talking about the existing irc ecosystem and communities, but I really doubt any of the big ones would be switching over.