Standardized Emotions
It sounds Orwellian, but it’s true. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has release a spec detailing the a mark up language for text. Personally, extremely disappointed. Emotion, like style, should be separate from content. What we need is Cascading Emotion Sheets. Here’s one of the W3C’s examples:
<emotion>
<category set="everydayEmotions" name="satisfaction"/>
</emotion>
Honestly now, what is the driving need for this? One possible use is for screen readers. You can read marked up text now with the proper inflections. The W3C suggests tagging time frames in videos with emotions - could this lead to a Google Emotion Search?
The business of standardization is peculiar in general. I think it’s clear that the world needs standards, and that somebody has to make them. One thought to chew on is that standardization is best done after various approaches have been tried, and we begin to know the best way of doing something.
- hmslydia