In my haste to get the news flash out, I failed to notice the Slashdot comment most obviously appropriate for the MCN constituency:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The emoticon is dead... long live XML! Thankfully, we no longer need to use this outdated technology of "emoticons" to denote humorous sentiments in email and online postings. Some have historically proposed the use of a "sarcasm" tag littered among ordinary text to convey the sarcastic emotion more accurately. I propose going one step further, and am proposing the Humour-XML standard, which will provide a much richer way to fully denote sentiments on the web. For instance, consider the sarcastic exprssion: I'll get right on that ;-) Even in this simple expression, the smiley face does not convey enough information to the reader to properly discern the mood of the poster. It is left ambiguous whether the poster is completely sarcastic, and will not "get right on that", or if the poster was merely in a humorous mood and implying that they will "get right on that" in a cheerful way. This failure to communicate is costing the American economy untold billions in lost productivity, rivaling that of "sick days" and movie piracy. The following is a rough draft of an XML standard I am proposing to completely eliminate our dependence on this obsolete form of communication. I propose a full XML schema devoted to conveying emotion in email, web postings, and Usenet "flame" messages. For instance, the previous message would be written in Humour-XML as: <?xml version="1.0"?> <posting> <message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)" /> </message> </posting> The message now contains no ambiguities ? the reader understands that the poster is "highly sarcastic" , and does not actually intend to "get right on that" The Humour-XML schema provides numerous benefits to users such as: enhanced text-to-speech renderings of postings (the speaker's voice could convey emotion, etc.), backwards compatibility with obsolete emoticons, UTF-8 support, building the Semantic Web from the ground up, and other benefits too numerous to enumerate here. Without extolling the virtues of this fantastic language too greatly, I'll touch on one more gold mine of usability: using XSLT [wikipedia.org] to transfrom Humour-XML to other forms, such as emoticon-text or even SVG graphics. For instance, we can define an XSLT stylesheet like so: <?xml version="1.0" ?> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; version="1.0"> <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/> <xsl:template match="posting"> <emoticon_text> <xsl:apply-templates/> </emoticon_text> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="message"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="message"> <xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="symbol" /> </xsl:text> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The example XSLT spreadsheet provided here should provide posters eager to try this amazing technology a head-start. I am in the process of carefully constructing a DTD for Humour-XML, as well as several more very useful XSLT stylesheets. I hereby disclaim all patents on said technology, and promise that Humour-XML is free for the world to use royalty-free, forever. by schmiddy (599730) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `yddimhcs'> on Tuesday September 18, @08:59PM (#20662575) (http://slashdot.org/) http://slashdot.org/articles/07/09/18/2313232.shtml
