Friday Fun: The sarcasm tag

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on May 25th, 2007.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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The Problem

Admit it. Go on. How many times a week are you caught out on the Internet by sarcasm? Or rather lack of understanding what is and isn’t sarcasm. I’d be the first to admit I get tripped up at least a couple of times a week. It happens on forums, blog comments and in communities. The problem is rife and we need something to de done about it.

The Need

I call for the <sarcasm> tag. HTML 5 should be able to accommodate another tag without too much harm. So, W3C, consider this an open letter (seems to be the fashion according to the Digg crowd these days) to call for its inclusion. Many an argument and misunderstanding would be prevented.

The Rendering

Of course every new tag needs a default rendering style by the browsers. And as sarcasm is a form of humour, why not render in bold Comic Sans like the following? (assuming you have this great font installed)

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

And there we go. Sarcasm solved.

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Meh, I could see this as being fairly useful, actually…

Ezekiel Bruni
May 25th, 2007
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Useful, yeah, but… It would sort of take away part of the “victoire!” feeling.

Still useful. Fair enough.

marian
May 25th, 2007
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I proposed the sarcasm tag back in day. Maybe someone in the HTML5 group can sneakily add it. That’d be fun. What about Sarcasm over IP…

trovster
May 25th, 2007
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The problem with sarcasm mad explicit is that, if you don’t get the double meaning, you become a target. Make sarcasm explicit and you destroy it :-)

Davide
May 25th, 2007
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I honestly think this could be a good idea!

If you think about it, it adds semantic meaning to text, just like strong and em do.

Chris James
May 25th, 2007
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Maybe if we don’t sneak it into HTML 5 it could be born as a microformat?

<p rel=”sarcasm”>This is much better</p>

Phil
May 25th, 2007
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Wow - you seem to be on board. OK, before I put it to the W3C HTML5 group, what attributes may the tag need? ; )

Andrew Faulkner
May 25th, 2007
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Erm. 95% of forums still have standard HTML formatting turned off, so it would still have a limited application.

I have seen a lot of people using tags already. With about the same effect, since there really wouldn’t be a way to consistently visually represent sarcasm.

Oh wait, the strikethrough! Oh. They’re already using that?

Brandon
May 25th, 2007
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You forgot the sarcasm tags around ‘great font’ =P

Chisa
May 25th, 2007
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@ Phil: It wouldn’t be a microformat. And the reason they’ve come up with the whole POSH stuff is to stop people calling Plain Old Semantic HTML a ‘microformat’. It’s just a semantic class/rule which you use. Microformats are more of a semantic HTML consensus to port existing standards in to HTML (such as hAtom/Atom and hCard/vCard) among other things. Also, I would not use the rel attribute for this solution, a class is more correct. Rel is for link/anchors to tell the user-agent what type of content is going to be found relative to this page.

trovster
May 31st, 2007
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A while ago a friend told me that there was a new sign for irony, just like the "!" only then the vertical stripe replaced with a thunderbolt. I think they should fix something like that up for sarcasm too.

YPM
June 5th, 2007
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Too bad I couldn’t tell if this article was sarcastic or not. I couldn’t find the <sarcasm> tag in the View Page Source. :)

Daniela
June 11th, 2007
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Why stop with just the sarcasm tag? You should make it a whole sub-language, called something like ’subtlety’ - although this will probably be shortened to SJAX or something equally ridiculous.Oh, and you really need to include irony, satire, ridicule and condesention at the very least.

Paul Enderson
June 12th, 2007
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Great suggestions, Paul.

I’ll get a spec written up and pass it onto a W3C member.

Andrew Faulkner
June 12th, 2007
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hi nice post, i enjoyed it

Krista
August 19th, 2007
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[…] was inspired by Andrew Faulkner’s post on Fadtastic from last […]

Proj
August 18th, 2008
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