I have a visual interface for displaying chat, And the way I currently have to download feels very dirty.
First I have to make a request to the API for the users account, which then returns a complete URL for a users avatar.
Then, I send another web request for the avatar.
Subsequent requests per each message from tmi still makes a request to the user endpoint, however the user avatars are generally cached, saving another request from being transmitted.
In comparison to other platforms, they allow much more friendly endpoints for this data.
Mixer follows a standard URL request -> redirect url /users/{user}/avatar on their API
Youtube is more straight forward, since they don’t redirect https://i1.ytimg.com/i/{ChannelID}/1.jpg
Both are not rate limited.