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> The IRCv3 Working Group is a collection of IRC client and server software authors working to enhance, maintain and standardize the IRC protocol using backwards-compatible extensions.

It's not a new protocol.

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Fair enough, but I feel you're being a little pedantic since there are base extensions described which are required, and optional extensions which are not required. TLS is one of the optional extensions.

So I'll reframe my question and ask: Why isn't TLS a base extension?

Hmm, I didn't see the 3.3 spec which is still being developed, it looks like they are doing strict transport security as a base extension. So that would address most of my concerns I think. I would still prefer to see TLS required no matter what.

The 'tls' extension is not actually TLS support. It is a method of upgrading plaintext connections to TLS via the STARTTLS command. It has some design problems and is going to be replaced with something that works similar to HTTP Strict Transport Security in the upcoming IRCv3.3 release which will be a base standard.

We strongly believe that the future of IRC is TLS-only.

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