molly.com
Sunday 29 June 2008
Molly’s New Microformat: Microtude
In order to make online communications more meaningful, I propose a new Microformat called “microtude” that, using the class attribute, will have a number of values to enhance the semantics of a given communication.
Let’s say you want to make a sarcastic comment. Knowing that most of your friends and colleagues understand you often keep your tongue in your cheek, it’s not necessary to wave a sarcasm flag in front of them. But what about those folks who don’t know you, and only have your text to help them understand the full impact of your comment? Microtude to the rescue! Consider the following:
<p> Wow, your code is so clean I can eat off of it! </p>
Using Microtude, you’d simply add the class with a value of “sarcasm” to clarify your intent:
<p class="sarcasm" > Wow, your code is so clean I can eat off of it! </p>
Pretty clear. Now I’m starting to work on the full range of allowed values for Microtude and this of course is where you come in. Suggestions and examples most welcome.
Filed under: humor, web design and development, announcement, creativity, molly asks you, just fun
Posted by: Molly | 4:56 am |
June 29th, 2008 at 5:25 am
That does make some sense. Preface that statement with the class labeled, ’serious’. It should be criminal to make someone think first thing on a Sunday morning. Preface that with a class labeled, ‘biteme’.
June 29th, 2008 at 5:25 am
funny and clear!
June 29th, 2008 at 5:31 am
I’m not the first to suggest this as our great friend Russ from maxdesign and Web Standards Group points out. GMTA, baby!
June 29th, 2008 at 5:50 am
You might want to also check out a campaign for a new font styling: sarcastic, which would join styles like bold and italic.
June 29th, 2008 at 6:15 am
You’ve go it all wrong. Because Celik thinks “dark data” (sic) will “dominate your destiny” (film at eleven!) that would have to be:
[p] Wow, your code is so clean I can eat off of it! ([span class=”attitude”]sarcasm[/span])[/p]
June 29th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Peh! HTML 5 has defined parsing rules for a closing “sarcasm” tag!
June 29th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I think there’s room for [span class=”earnest-bewilderment”]Why would anyone want that?[/span], [span class=”fawning”]Oh, God, this is just the coolest[/span], [span class=”apathy”]SomeApp 10.1.1 fixes a typo in the About box[/span], [span class=”paranoia”]Who are you, and why are you linking to my site?[/span], [span class=”hysteria”]Gay marriage will destroy the fabric of our society![/span] and [span class=”hostility”]Die, bitch![/span].
I look forward to seeing future conferences on the Sarcastic Web.
June 29th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Isn’t the whole point of sarcasm that you should deliver it deadpan so no-one necessarily knows you’re being sarcastic? Or is microtude (love it for the name alone!) necessary because machines can’t understand irony?!
June 29th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Is defining microformats a free for all?
If so, the whole thing will turn into a joke when it goes mainstream - imagine everybody creating microformats in their language or style. It will just turn into a mush of meaningless markup babel
June 29th, 2008 at 7:19 am
[…] Molly over at molly.com wrote an article on a new micro-format proposal, Microtude. On one side I thought this was a good post. In a way I agree. FTA: In order to make online communications more meaningful, I propose a new Microformat called “microtude” that, using the class attribute, will have a number of values to enhance the semantics of a given communication. […]
June 29th, 2008 at 7:43 am
[p class=”sarcasm”]That’s cool, but whatever you do don’t include the date in the title of the abbr element.[/p]
June 29th, 2008 at 8:43 am
This isn’t likely to be workable. The list of potential emotional slants and semantic nuance are endless, and a Microformat that were to handle them as described would either have to have a huge list of allowed values, or it’d list only a few core ones and thus make the thing pointless. This is about expression in natural language surely, who want’s to look up what values are allowed at the point of writing? There’s just too much scope. For example:
happy (joy, delight, thrill, content, glad, satisfied, ecstatic, merry, cheerful)
depressed (dejected, blue, dispirited, glum, low, despondent, gloomy, downcast, sad, melencholy)
sly (but as in tongue-in-cheek, or as in mean?)
sarcastic (cynical, ironic, ridicule, scorn, mock, derision)
All of those alternates are valid natural language synonyms that people might want to use.
[span class=’attitude’]value[/span] is the only method I can think of that allows enough flexibility for the idea to work. Plus it has the handy benefit of actually being vilisible to the reader.
How exactly is the data going to be exposed, and what use would it have?
June 29th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Also, isn’t this what smiles are all about anyway?
June 29th, 2008 at 9:29 am
This would take away my ability to reply “that was sarcasm, moron.” Where’s the fun in that?
For millennium, writers have been able to clearly define their microtude using context alone, and an (sometimes unwarranted) expectation of intelligence on the readers’ part. Pointing out the emotion connected to a statement is like a long explanation of a punchline.
[span class=”reference, respect”]But in the framework of blog comments, it could be invaluable.[/span]
June 29th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Sounds a little like XFN!
June 29th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I think it should be:
…
June 29th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Do people really think I’m serious? Maybe it’s just ME who needs the sarcasm sign!
June 29th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I didn’t!
June 29th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
@Matt Wilcox: That’s what defined taxonomies are all about!
@Molly: I approve of the microtude, maybe the microformat should be extended to cover common writing styles to make mark-up cleaner? Like Douglas said, maybe it should become a non-rel based extension of the XFN microformat?
[a href=”http://lapse.nerdvana.org.au” rel=”friend” attitude=”sarcastic,funny(he-thinks),australian”]Colin[/a].
June 30th, 2008 at 12:55 am
I actually checked html source to see if you used the sarcasm class for this post
June 30th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Oh, on the one hand, it’s clear that you’re not serious.
On the other hand, it’s an interesting approach.
June 30th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I actually really like the idea of mood-centric styling.
Plus, any excuse to not being forced to tack a smiley on the end of every sentence…
June 30th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Okay, so now we have to talk about the limitations of Microformats.
@Douglas nailed it. It’s like XFN.
Or the original idea behind Microformats: Simple, human-readable solutions.
So the scenario for use could be: Gather up the values, calculate them with JavaScript and use an XSLT to transform those results into a table (or even
:X) symbol that could just give you the emotional jist of the post at hand.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Ooh, and @Rich, the idea of “mood-centric styling” is very clever.
The online world is not a written book. The writer is limited in his or her ability to convey a great deal. Yes, a great writer might be able to do that well, but let’s face it, if you’re a great writer, you’re off busy writing.
The rest of us okay writers who work on the Web, well, I know as one of those I’d love a simple way to both visual and in code display my moods without having to describe them explicitly each time.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Okay, now we have to talk about the limitations of making any kind of positive declaration about the way you are feeling, whether that be by the humble emoticon or mark-up based expression.
You might be being sarcastic! Such declarations aren’t objective. It would be hard for machines to extract stable meaning from them. (The similarities to XFN aren’t coincidental.) Machines don’t do irony, and the day they do will be like the day my cats develop opposable thumbs and take over my house!
It would be a fun experiment, though, if a writer of a blog marked up a happy paragraph with [p class=”happy”] or similar and had CSS to show a picture of them smiling (and so on with all the other emotions). It might also teach them to use the microformat sparingly!
June 30th, 2008 at 4:55 am
[p class=”serious”]I’m think this is actually a good idea! There could be a use for this in relation to CSS mediatype=aural. When a passage is read by a speaking web browser, the author could tag words, sentences or paragraphs with vocal inflection information so that screen reader would use a voice style appropriate to the content, rather that the limiting range of options currently available in the CSS spec.[/p]
June 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Ah! You may need to consult HTSL (Hypertext Snarkup Language) author Robert Anderson: http://et.cairene.net/2006/03/06/snark-it-up/
June 30th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[…] Though I should have noticed the “humor” and “just fun” tags, Molly Holzschlag’s post on Sunday <a href=”http://www.molly.com/2008/06/29/mollys-new-microformat-microtude/”>Molly’s New Microformat: Microtude</a> had me wishing that we didn’t have to spoon feed our intentions when writing for an online audience. That we have to point out the sarcasm in our statement takes the edge off the sarcasm in the first place. And that makes for an uninteresting article. […]
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:54 pm
[…] We were just toying with the idea of a non-serious microformat about attitudes called “Microtude.” Some pointed out that defining attitude for verbal human language as a microformat couldn’t possibly stand; others saw its merit. Then someone said “machines don’t do irony.” Which got me thinking about the semantic web. Lowercase or uppercase, this comment disturbs me. […]
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 am
[…] molly.com » Molly’s New Microformat: Microtude I so need that. (tags: humor blog microformats sarcasm lang:en irony) […]
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:28 am
I think Microtude is a fabulous idea. The real meaning is often lost and this seems to help a little.
I have thousands of friends
I have thousands of friends
I have thousands of friends
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 am
Apologies, that example lost its meaning when it was submitted. Here it is again:
p class=”sarcasm” I have thousands of friends
p class=”bragging” I have thousands of friends
p class=”joking” I have thousands of friends
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:55 am
@antony: sorry about the lack of HTML support - but your example is a clear, funny, exact specimen of what I’m aiming at here!
serious=”molly”
Oh hell and one of these too
July 6th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I’ve been doing something similar for years in email, making up “HTML tags”
[rant]
this thing is stupid
[/rant]
I guess now I’ll have to progress to CSS! [p class=”srsly”]I love it.[/p]
July 7th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
To be honest, maybe this should be relegated to CSS aural stylesheets. I mean, how can Jaws know what mood the paragraph is attempting to convey without there being some sort of indication of the tone?
Still, there is merit to putting it in HTML, as well. As with so many microformats, I would just LOVE if some of the more ingenious ones, like this one, were not just reserved classes but were actually elements and attributes added to the specifications (I mean, obviously not in XHTML 2 or HTML 5 … they’re fine the way they are! Please standardize them quickly and worry about the kinks later!), but I suppose better yet would be if browsers started looking at XML properly so we could simply import semantically meaningful elements and attributes ad hoc.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:18 am
slm
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:13 am
[…] ovvero il Camp di Susan Sontag, il gioco di parole è presto fatto: perchè non realizzare un campCamp? Lo trovate esilarante? Secondo me unirebbe l’universo web (n+1).0 alla generazioneprecedente che passava ore in camera oscura o in laboratorio o a leggere/studiare sui libri, magari anche li scriveva e diventavano fondamentali, come la già citata Susan Sontag con il suo “Sulla fotografia“, e che tuttora persiste in queste pratiche desuete (vorrei tanto usare un microformat “sarcasm” - come suggeriva mollydotcom). Io che sono un ibrido tra questi due mondi, concepisco queste idee balenghe (qualcuno direbbe boiate, ma lo spazio commenti è libero!) […]