One of my many Firefox home page tabs is another tab dedicated to w3.org which is there to remind me to check what is new and happening in the world of markup languages, standards and specifications. I don’t actually check it that often (I’ll freely admit) so was surprised to see that we have a new Emotion Markup Language. Surely, I thought we have now gone too far. Emotions can only be communicated by people. Preferably face to face but at least by voice.
And then I began to think about the potential for this. Communication by email, text messaging and Instant Messenger is extremely limited in it’s ability to communicate emotion. I find myself sprinkling smiley faces liberally throughout my communications in order to make clear that the mood is happy or amusing or light rather than heavy handed. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for one emoticon.
Think about the potential for communicating with Autistic children? I am more than certain that the initial recommendation will be fraught with limitations but it will be interesting to watch it’s maturing process.
