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My semantic-web-loving cold dead heart disagrees with you on the "more interesting". The one really good idea in the whole Semantic Web train-wreck (and at thi

My semantic-web-loving cold dead heart disagrees with you on the "more interesting". The one really good idea in the whole Semantic Web train-wreck (and at this distance, I think it's fair to call it that) was that everything should have a negotiable, dereferencable URL. REST includes that core principle. A lot of single-page web apps make me sad because they've been designed without reference to that. If what you're building is genuinely an application, then I get it; but most of the time what you're building is a catalogue, and everything in that can have an address, so it should.

gavinpc 10y ago
I agree 100% about catalogues and addressability. I'm also a diehard in that respect, and I've come to distinguish "apps" in a similar manner, as sites where either there's no "business case" for an ontology, or the content is too transient for it to matter. Naming is hard... I think that's what makes the "semantic web" a kind of chimera even for those who endorse it. Can a URL really capture the worldwide identity of a thing? Over all time? And who's going to maintain all those names? Suppose that naming everything is intractable as a human effort, but we still want addressability. Alan Kay takes this to the extreme, saying, why not give every object on the internet an IP address? [0] Not every resource, every object, in every program. It sounds facetious, but it's consistent with his general objects-as-computers-all-the-way-down view. His system designs (including those from VPRI) express the belief that hard barriers between the layers of a system (usage and application, application and framework, framework and OS) account for much of today's uncontrollable code bloat and the limits on how much scale systems can tolerate. The "everything gets an IP address" idea is just a recognition that network boundaries will eventually be seen the same way. From this perspective, it might be fruitful to think about how we'd identify things on the internet if they were homogenous with the objects in our applications. [0] It's in one of his talks but I don't remember which.

gavinpc 10y ago

I agree 100% about catalogues and addressability. I'm also a diehard in that respect, and I've come to distinguish "apps" in a similar manner, as sites where either there's no "business case" for an ontology, or the content is too transient for it to matter. Naming is hard... I think that's what makes the "semantic web" a kind of chimera even for those who endorse it. Can a URL really capture the worldwide identity of a thing? Over all time? And who's going to maintain all those names? Suppose that naming everything is intractable as a human effort, but we still want addressability. Alan Kay takes this to the extreme, saying, why not give every object on the internet an IP address? [0] Not every resource, every object, in every program. It sounds facetious, but it's consistent with his general objects-as-computers-all-the-way-down view. His system designs (including those from VPRI) express the belief that hard barriers between the layers of a system (usage and application, application and framework, framework and OS) account for much of today's uncontrollable code bloat and the limits on how much scale systems can tolerate. The "everything gets an IP address" idea is just a recognition that network boundaries will eventually be seen the same way. From this perspective, it might be fruitful to think about how we'd identify things on the internet if they were homogenous with the objects in our applications. [0] It's in one of his talks but I don't remember which.