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The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-)
klubar writes "Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman who says he was the first to use three keystrokes. 'Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.'"
And it wasn't short after that fateful day, in the next post in fact, that the 8========D came along, forever ruining the intarweb. Historians would later say it was only a matter of time.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
nobody knows YOU INSENSATIVE CLOD!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Today's Headline - New Hieroglyph Discovered in Egyptian Pyramid
And in recent new today a new Hieroglyph has been discovered with the Great Pyramid of Giza. The symbol appears to consist of two vertically adjacent circles and a single curve segment whose curvature is oriented such that the 2 circles appear to be near the center of the circle that would be formed were the curve's slope extended out. Our man on the scene has provided us with a crude sketch of this Hieroglyph, whose meaning is unknown but which is suspected to be related to one of the primary emotions humans have experienced since the dawn of time.
: ) Note how the segment appears to be a piece of a general circle center on the 2 dots. Why a segment of a circle was chosen,
^ Rather than the full circle itself, and why it is centered on the dots, is currently unknown
Also Note how the two circles are placed one directly over the other. Most other Hieroglyphs have utilized slight angles, generally sloping inwards, so this discovery may help understand a great many things that are currently unknown about Egyptian society
This has been Faux News' Archeology Department. Stay tuned for the weather.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
you grew up in a 300 baud modem? must have been both uncomfortable and incredibly noisy. it'd be like constantly trying to see through the hayes.
to email me: take my
"Anyone else see an obvious mistake here? :D"
;-) :-P :-( :-| :-)
I have NO idea what you are talking about!
now bite me!
oh, wait, I'm sorry, that was rude
forgive me?
yes? ALRIGHT!
Nice ATtitude. Triple-plus.
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 thatEven 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 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:text>
<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: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.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
AArrgh... Too many old-fart nerd jokes here! I'm gonna&#*(% NO CARRIER