wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more
The smilie :) is the wagging tail of the internet. Since all other contextual cues (like body language and tone of voice) are missing, we basically set the tone by adding anthropomorphic cues :) :| :( to accent our words. I saw these used maybe 20 times in various things I read today, and in most cases the :) could be translated roughly as "please don't kick my ass".
It's amazing we can communicate at all.
"You suck :)"
"You're nuts :P"
"pwnt!!11! :)"
"omgwtfpwnt. >:D"
It's amazing we can communicate at all.
(Nerd note: I typed in text smilies. If you are seeing picture smilies, the text smilies were replaced with pictures using a neat little javascript hack. You can see the script here.)
EDIT: it seems IE messes this up. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I changed my site's script so that it will work in IE, but I left some of the smilies in the linked javascript file unchanged as proof of concept and also so people will know how to do this stuff on that far-off day when MS writes a browser that works.
EDIT: it seems IE messes this up. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I changed my site's script so that it will work in IE, but I left some of the smilies in the linked javascript file unchanged as proof of concept and also so people will know how to do this stuff on that far-off day when MS writes a browser that works.
3 Comments:
h.
I did some checking, and it's not your security settings... it is IE's inability to follow standards. I changed the happy face back to something IE could understand, but left the others as they are, and IE now gets 1 out of 5 smilies right, but still gets red boxes on the others.
One of my coworkers at my last job was a strong IE advocate, and he was always bitching about how bad some sites looked. The pages looked fine in Mozilla and Opera, but the IE user didn't know that, so he assumed the pages were poorly written. Unfortunately in this context 'poorly written' means 'follows established web standards'.
Some days I think I am just going to change the code on this site so all IE users see is one big red X. I sure as hell am not going to do what most companies do (look at the code behind the Blogger GUI, for instance) and double the size of my code with hacks around all of IE's 'features'.
I've been working on a new template for this site, and as long as I stick to HTML 4.01 the code will run fine in all browsers. If I want to use any of the features that have been developed in the last 7 years I almost invariably end up needing to write 2 sets of code, one for IE and one for everyone else. That's just sad.
I'll put a caveat in the smilie code, and tell people how to work around it. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
h.
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