The idea of embedding links to multimedia is a good one. They just need to form an open standard for encoding media and rich text in text streams, and let clients parse the standard and decide how to format it. Text clients could remove any multimedia/rich text, GUI users could render it all, blind users would receive alt-tags in a way that's easily spoken by TTS, etc. Because it's a standard for encoding media in a text stream, you don't have to change the IRC protocol, just add a plugin to the client. You could even format it so the simplest clients could just strip everything but the text.<p>Something like:<p><pre><code> %M!i=//shrt.url/j3f87h38f;t=fr,bb;a=Kitten Mittens!
Finally, there is an elegant, comfortable mitten for cats.
</code></pre>
This indicates an image link, a text foreground color of red, text background color of black, and alt-text for the image as "Kitten Mittens". Any existing IRC client can simply remove everything from "%M!" to the "!" + newline, or if they don't, the text just shows up on its own line below the metadata, which isn't hard to read. You could even encode it in-line, such as <i>"This is some %M!t=fr,b!text!."</i> Harder to read if the client doesn't implement the standard, though.