emTextem

Emtextem is a hypothetical encoding designed to embed textual emphasis and emotional cues within plain text streams without altering the underlying characters. It relies on lightweight, human-readable tags that can be added inline and later rendered by capable clients or stripped for plain-text processing.

The core elements of emtextem are inline tags that convey emphasis and emotion. The emphasis tag uses a pair of opening and closing markers, such as <em> and </em>, to indicate that the enclosed text should be emphasized. Emotional cues are expressed with self-closing tags like <emo name="smile"/> or <emo name="sad"/>, where the name attribute identifies the intended affect. Tags can be nested, allowing strings such as <em>wow <emo name="astonished"/> indeed</em>, or combined with multiple emotions, for example, <em>hello <emo name="joy"/> world</em>. The design emphasizes ASCII compatibility and requires no changes to the underlying characters if a rendering layer is unavailable; clients that do not understand emtextem will simply ignore the tags.

History and development: emtextem was proposed in 2018 by researchers at the Center for Textual Interfaces as a response to rising misinterpretation of tone in plain text communications. The concept has since seen limited, mainly experimental adoption in research prototypes and some messaging apps, where it is used to explore how explicit tone markers affect readability and accessibility.

Applications and limitations: Potential applications include instant messaging, collaborative documents, and accessibility tools that benefit from explicit tone signaling. Limitations include inconsistent support across platforms, cultural variability in emotion interpretation, and the risk of disrupting readability if overused. As a proposed standard, emtextem remains exploratory, with ongoing discussions about interoperability and best practices.

See also: emoji, markup languages, plain text annotation, accessible communication.