When this showed up in my RSS reader this morning, my first response was, “wait, today isn’t April 1!”

Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0

Apparently it’s serious:

As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The present draft specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a “plug-in” language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.

I’ll believe it when I see it.