[whatwg] sarcasm

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:18:23 +0200, Charles Iliya Krempeaux  
<supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:

>> It occurs to me that one of the most frequently used nits of
>> pseudo-markup is to indicate sarcasm. For example,
>>
>> <sarcasm>Yeah, George W. Bush has been such a great president.</sarcasm>
>>
>> Should we perhaps formalize this? Is there any benefit to be achieved by
>> adding an explicit sarcasm element to HTML?

In Western typography, there is already a tradition to mark up irony with  
quotation marks:

Yeah, George W. Bush has been such a “great” president.

I don't think a structural markup is required for something that has a  
punctuation tradition, just like we don't introduce structural markup for  
sentences (the punctuation, such as a full stop after the sentence,  
suffices).

> Also... I've heard that Ethiopian Semitic languages and French actually  
> has a punctuation mark for sarcasm.

There was such an idea, but it hasn't been widely adopted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com