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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.'"
That means 1983 or so.
/.
I know we were using these on a message board in 1979-1980 at a community college in Michigan prior to then. I might even be able to dig some of it up as I printed off a lot of messages back then and may still have them in an old computer paper box.
Rather odd anyone would lay a claim to inventing it. I'm certain the concept dates further back to teletypes and such.
Ah well, anything to start a ruckus on
(c:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I hate how you type :) in IM or message boards now and they replace the :) with a graphic. I think that ruins it.
I won't even get into how annoying it is when it changes part of your text that isn't a smiley into a smiley only because it detects the text. It is like how some MMORPGS do ***umption and stuff.
God spoke to me.
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.
The article is about how the smiley face is used for humorus purposed, so how many geeks missed that the title was actually a joke, looks like just about everyone so far. Wow I don't know if I should be happy that I got it, or terrified that I did. Well anyways. (.) (.) V
I remember early - mid nineties when I used to draw ascii (newschool, though I dabbled a bit in the oldschool too) for various groups / BBS in the 905/416/519 region (southern ontario and parts of quebec), that there used to be a different system instead of smileys. Smileys were frowned upon. Instead the system revolved around:
(g) - grin
(bg) - big grin
(vbg) - very big grin
I wonder if it was just a local thing, or if anyone else used to use that too.
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
I believe there is prior art, found in an 18th century poem. I'd bet that typesetters had been mucking about with this stuff since the invention of movable type.
http://maul.deepsky.com/~merovech/smiley.html
What? Me? Worry?
"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
that article talks about the graphical smiley face. In fact, we are talking about using the colon, dash, and close paren to make a smiley, in which case it is even OLDER!
:) :(
It's authorship was credited to the late Harvey Ball (who drew it in the 1960s). "Smiley" is in an ad in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 10 March 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. See for yourself. The ad is for the film LILI, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. The "World Premiere Today" is at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington. The film opened nationwide, and this ad ran in many newspapers.
Today
You'll laugh
You'll cry
You'll love
_Lili_