There are some great chat themes out there designed for Adium.

This project focuses on giving the developer the ability to exercise these themes

A chat system is cut up into a few components:

1. Receive user input and translate into events
2. Send user's events to the chat server
   • send chat server request for information like users in a channel
   • send chat server a message to a channel or another user
3. Receive events from the chat server
   • receive chat message from a user
   • receive a list of users in a channel
   • receive a list of channels
4. Display chat server events to the user
   • display user chat message in a channel
   • display list of users in a channel
   • display list of channels. (allowing someone to join - see step 1)

This project focuses on letting the developer mimic the events received in 3 and leveraging Adium Message Styles to display them in a browser.

Message Styles have a good reference and tutorial. Contact List Styles also have There are some great reference articles about [Message Styles][] and [Contact List Styles][] [adium files][]. [tutorial 1]

[Contact List Styles]: [adium files]: https://adium.im/help/pgs/Miscellaneous-LocationsAdiumFiles.html

The event system in irc is currently string based, but they are striving to make it more json centric.

The event system in adiumis can be sumarized by the Template file, other projects are Psi are leveraging this template file and driving it using javascript

I am not affiliate with Adium, and I have not dived into their code. This is based upon the information I have read from the theme creation articles on Adium Xtras.