Response: New Microformat – Microtude

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.

Subtle things such as sarcasm, tone, etc. are often lost in the text. In fact, I’ve seen situations erupt because someone wrote something down to a client rather than called them. Plus in the “semantic” web, we are always in search of meaning. However, I think this more applies to things such as IM or the Twitter type applications.

The reason I believe so is that often web pages, articles, blog posts, etc. are written in large scale. What I mean is that you can understand the tone of the article by reading the full article. The real use case is when fragments come into play. If I have a fragment, just as is suggested by Molly, then I have no before or after text to help me assess the meaning of the statement. That means that I will have a very hard time translating the semantic meaning behind the words. Since we use inflection and tone to provide meaning to our statements, we do need something that helps us. But, in general people can understand that meaning when it is wrapped in larger groups of statements.

Another thing to consider here is that things such as sarcasm are often understood through the delivery of the statement, meaning dramatic pauses and the likes. Languages have many constructs already built in to support this. In fact, how do authors of novels make these kinds of things happen without havng a microformat? Maybe the rest of us just simply need to become better writers and readers.

Just some food for thought.

** UPDATE **

I had assumed, when reading the post, that it was more a joke than anything. My post is just about entertaining the idea. Keep that in mind while reading. Some “non-sensical” ideas turn out to be good ones, so taking a stab at trying to see if it is worthwhile isn’t something that I’m opposed to doing.