W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, a group that works on and tries to define standards used on the Web. Such as the new HTML5 spec, CSS, XML, SVG and things like that. This is in order to promote interoperability between various applications (such as browsers) acting upon the data that is on the WWW. This way, when browsers adhere to the standards, webpages should look and function the same on whatever browser or OS you're using, which is nice for users and reduces stress for webdevelopers. They made great advances with this in the past couple of years, btw.
However, sometimes they try to standardize things that probably weren't meant to be standardized:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotionml-20081120/
so... if I understand this properly, and I'm pretty sure I don't...
this document is trying to define standards for "emotional annotation"?
And what does that mean? Is an emotional annotation something used to clarify the non-textual portion of a message? Sort of like the difference between these two posts?
Quotegreat post :lulz:
and
Quotegreat post :boring:
I do think that we would avoid a lot of confusion on the net if there were a standard way of communicating sarcasm, sympathy, hostility, etc. Context often isn't enough. We need a sarcasm
font.
is that what this is about?
Seems to be something like that, yeah. The project has been abandoned, though :)