Next generation emoticons
September 8, 2001 1:16 PM   Subscribe

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted by rushmc (15 comments total)
 
A language designed to convey emotions is dubbed "HumanML". Why are emotions always identified so strongly with "being human"? Even animals have emotions after a fashion. Isn't it our capability for rational thought that is most uniquely human?
posted by gd779 at 1:45 PM on September 8, 2001


"Humour is often lost during translation, but could be tagged as funny in HumanML."

Um, yeah...like I'm going to laugh anyway, even though I don't understand why it's funny.
posted by Su at 1:48 PM on September 8, 2001


Yeah, but wouldn't a "Rational Thought Markup Language" just be sort of redundant? Personally, I'm worried about maybe an attitude-based markup humor. I can see people hacking religious sites and putting "disillusioned" tags around the whole thing. Wouldn't that be fun.
posted by j.edwards at 1:54 PM on September 8, 2001


I find it interesting. Anything that strengthens semantics on the web is useful.

Why the cynicism? _That's_ what I don't understand.
posted by jackiemcghee at 1:58 PM on September 8, 2001


I can see people hacking religious sites and putting "disillusioned" tags around the whole thing. Wouldn't that be fun.

i haven't laughed that hard in a long time
posted by mabelcolby at 2:05 PM on September 8, 2001


HumanML, the web site. Surely this is a sign that the end times are near.
posted by rschram at 2:06 PM on September 8, 2001


How many other contextual markups can we invent? ReligionML, PoliticsML, PoliticalCorrectnessML, Bad TasteML, RelevanceML...the possibilities are endless.
posted by rushmc at 3:39 PM on September 8, 2001


Jackie: There's cynicism because while it's a nice idea, it's probably not very well thought-out right now, my example being one of the most obvious. It's the equivalent of being told a joke you don't get, or for that matter don't even understand because it's in another language and it doesn't translate, and then having the person say, "Laugh. It's funny."

Would you?

Let's not even get into the issues with someone posting hate and marking it up as funny. Oh, haha.

The part that amuses me is that they want to make this XML compatible. Isn't this just another form of the presentational markup XML is supposed to get rid of?
posted by Su at 4:06 PM on September 8, 2001


Hey wait a minute, does this mean that all the emotional/non-verbal information that I've been receiving from the things I read everyday has been invalid for all these years? Was I mistaken in believing that good writing could convey this information without stupid tags?
posted by chester at 5:23 PM on September 8, 2001


[sarcasm] At least it would keep people from adding those annoying fake tags to their snarky MeFi posts [/sarcasm]
posted by briank at 6:35 PM on September 8, 2001


So then, if I wrote [serious]boooiiing![/serious] and sent it to my teenaged male friends, they wouldn't laugh?

[thinking depth="contemplative"]Hmm...[/thinking]
posted by Ptrin at 7:26 PM on September 8, 2001


[?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?]
[title] Posting [/title]
[happiness] :-) [/happiness]
[sadness] :-( [/sadness]


There we go, emotion based on XML. ;-)
posted by benjh at 7:36 PM on September 8, 2001


Didn't you mean [winkiness] ;-) [/winkiness] ?

Thought so [smugness] :-) [/smugness]
posted by Ptrin at 7:54 PM on September 8, 2001


No, because my winkiness was in HTML, not XML. ;-)
posted by benjh at 8:28 AM on September 9, 2001


Su, I take your point, but all ideas start off small and malformed. And as for misuse, big deal. Everything is misused by someone. Should we be cynical about HTML because of Stormfront.Org?

And it's more to do with semantics than presentation, surely.
posted by jackiemcghee at 10:13 AM on September 9, 2001


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