4 ms·

I find it ironic that this blog post is made by stackoverflow. A company whose sole purpose is questions and answers, but whose website doesn't even have a prin

I find it ironic that this blog post is made by stackoverflow. A company whose sole purpose is questions and answers, but whose website doesn't even have a print stylesheet. The semantic web was much more than bots. It meant transformability and adaptiveness of information. Braille displays are just as important as print, web, screen and other targets. Sadly modern day web browsers have such less support for it that they even dropped the media device targets from the CSS spec, which I think is morally wrong. Did you know that screenreaders, palm PDAs and others all had support for it...and that publishing to a new platform was as easy as linking a new stylesheet? None of that HTML5 crap was necessary. No modernizr, no JS, no pixelperfect designs necessary. It just worked. XHTML 1.1 strict ran everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean even the mobile audiobook players that used the DAISY format. Fully automatically transformed, and voiced over content. Imagine a web where you could train your personal assistant without any machine learning, and where information is automatically connected, researched, gathered and related. That kind of internet is the necessary step for our species to reach a superintelligence level. Without it, humans will stay as dumb as the internet is right now. Full of misinformation, deceit, and financial players "shaping" public opinion and manipulating the truth.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Apart from it having been introduced by W3C as part of heir 1998-2004ish push for renovating the web, I can't see what XHTML and CSS media queries have to do with SemWeb, though. There's no reason to be bitter about the failure of XML/XHTML on the web as the good parts (SVG, MathML to some degree) have been incorporated into HTML5. To the contrary, one could say W3C's fixation on XML (and RDF/sparql) gave rise to WHATWG/Google, and their vision for the appification of the web.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  XML was designed as a federation of interoperable notations. The notations could co-exist and independently and organically grow and enhance the web in all ways. This is a much broader vision than what HTML turned into.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Fair point, but neither is nor was XML necessary for new vocabularies or vocabulary evolution (since SGML facilitates that already), nor has RDF/sparql anything to do with it. I'd argue that the organizational lock-up W3C has created with the long XML/XHTML meta-syntax detour and unrealistic XHTML extensions such as XForms resulted in HTML not being extended at all, while everything around it (CSS, JS) was made too powerful to cater for HTML's stagnation during that period.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  I think that the way HTML5 is used these days is more as a way to build a design, rather than a way to deliver semantic content. When looking at the Alexa top 1000, you'll find not a single semantic website that cares about their markup, most of them not even having an alternative text for images. The Semantic Web also came with the idea of separating content, design and functionality; and came with the idea of having optional JS rather than integrating it to build intermixed components and (ab-?)using it to build a web page. Personally, I think that this is a view on "how to build a website" that a lot of web developers lack these days, because they just clutter their web page full of JSX and don't care about how it looks like - as long as it is a pixelperfect implementation of what they are tasked to implement. Webpack and others just minify it anyways, so nobody cares whether or not their code can be read by humans. The difference to how web development was perceived back then was that a handcrafted website was worth much more, and developers would argue and defend their implementations with things like "but it's validated, and it has print stylesheets!". But anyways, with that experience comes a lot of understanding what the Web used to be: It was a web of craftsmanship, and not a web of advertisement. People were proud of what they built. Personally, I hope that people value my craftsmanship; so my personal websites all have code that I can identify myself with and that I'm proud of. So my portfolio includes a lot of gimmicks for kids, people, and likeminded people that they can explore and be fascinated with. [1] Coming full circle to what I hope the web could be: I think that a mixture of the Semantic aspects and today's Web Apps are necessary, and that this can only be achieved using swarm intelligence mechanisms. A centralized way is always too proprietary to outlive its creator. Combining that with a decentralized approach for training AIs on the labels could be a glimmer of hope that the web isn't lost yet. That's why I started to build Tholian and its Browser [2] [1] https://cookie.engineer https://cookie.engineer [2] https://tholian.network https://tholian.network
  - robertoandred 6y ago
    JSX and clean semantic markup are not mutually exclusive.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
lmm 6y ago
> Did you know that screenreaders, palm PDAs and others all had support for it...and that publishing to a new platform was as easy as linking a new stylesheet? None of that HTML5 crap was necessary. No modernizr, no JS, no pixelperfect designs necessary. It just worked. XHTML 1.1 strict ran everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean even the mobile audiobook players that used the DAISY format. Fully automatically transformed, and voiced over content. And yet none of it really worked. CSS was never good enough because the layouts you need on different platforms require a different markup hierarchy, so either you write some transformations in CSS and some awkwardly coupled XSLT or you do everything in XSLT. But XSLT was awful for humans and awful for tools; I'm all for declarative sub-Turing languages (efforts like Dhall are wonderful) but XSLT is just bad at being one of them. Even if people made a transformation that worked for some pages, it'd fail for others, because it's impossible to write a transformation correctly for arbitrary input pages and testing every m*n combination of page + transformation is tedious and unrewarding. The only way you could make XSLT or CSS do the right thing is if your page markup was reliably consistent because you generated all your pages with the same program - but if you're generating everything from a common sources it's easier and more reliable to just generate whichever different versions of your page you want (mobile/print/whatever) from that. People don't actually know or care about the semantics of their pages. Designers want pixel-perfect layouts because they care much more about what their page looks like than what it says, and non-designers had to use the same techniques as designers because browsers were asleep at the wheel in how they handled unstyled pages.
- blablabla123 6y ago
  > People don't actually know or care about the semantics of their pages. Designers want pixel-perfect layouts because they care much more about what their page looks like than what it says, and non-designers had to use the same techniques as designers because browsers were asleep at the wheel in how they handled unstyled pages. When showing what possibilities there are, they are used no matter by whom. For instance when I showed what is possible with inline svg in React everybody in the team bought into that eventually. Also designers are (in contrast to artists) all about creating things considering a lot of constraints. Most web designers know at least basic html so it's possible to design for and therefore work with reusable markups To me XHTML failed because it was really painful to use (and still is). You forget one closing tag and everything fails. The amount of people using IDEs (or even XML editors) are still in the minority. On the other hand React proves that XML (JSX) can be used in a modern way. That's probably mostly due to the fact that it's not used in one big blob but modularized into more digestible pieces and the barrier to write custom functionality is really low
feralimal 6y ago
> Sadly modern day web browsers have such less support for it that they even dropped the media device targets from the CSS spec, which I think is morally wrong. 'Morally wrong'? This is an interesting phrase to use - are you able to explain more on this?
- nullifidian 6y ago
  What is there to explain? The decision to deprecate it harmed blind individuals. It's wrong to harm people, even by inaction, especially when you are a multi-billion (sometimes trillion) dollar quasi-monopolist...
  - feralimal 6y ago
    I get you! This is something that impacted blind individuals. I didn't know. Thanks.
jxramos 6y ago
Exactly, full access to distilled primary source material!

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Apart from it having been introduced by W3C as part of heir 1998-2004ish push for renovating the web, I can't see what XHTML and CSS media queries have to do with SemWeb, though. There's no reason to be bitter about the failure of XML/XHTML on the web as the good parts (SVG, MathML to some degree) have been incorporated into HTML5. To the contrary, one could say W3C's fixation on XML (and RDF/sparql) gave rise to WHATWG/Google, and their vision for the appification of the web.

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
XML was designed as a federation of interoperable notations. The notations could co-exist and independently and organically grow and enhance the web in all ways. This is a much broader vision than what HTML turned into.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Fair point, but neither is nor was XML necessary for new vocabularies or vocabulary evolution (since SGML facilitates that already), nor has RDF/sparql anything to do with it. I'd argue that the organizational lock-up W3C has created with the long XML/XHTML meta-syntax detour and unrealistic XHTML extensions such as XForms resulted in HTML not being extended at all, while everything around it (CSS, JS) was made too powerful to cater for HTML's stagnation during that period.
cookiengineer 6y ago
I think that the way HTML5 is used these days is more as a way to build a design, rather than a way to deliver semantic content. When looking at the Alexa top 1000, you'll find not a single semantic website that cares about their markup, most of them not even having an alternative text for images. The Semantic Web also came with the idea of separating content, design and functionality; and came with the idea of having optional JS rather than integrating it to build intermixed components and (ab-?)using it to build a web page. Personally, I think that this is a view on "how to build a website" that a lot of web developers lack these days, because they just clutter their web page full of JSX and don't care about how it looks like - as long as it is a pixelperfect implementation of what they are tasked to implement. Webpack and others just minify it anyways, so nobody cares whether or not their code can be read by humans. The difference to how web development was perceived back then was that a handcrafted website was worth much more, and developers would argue and defend their implementations with things like "but it's validated, and it has print stylesheets!". But anyways, with that experience comes a lot of understanding what the Web used to be: It was a web of craftsmanship, and not a web of advertisement. People were proud of what they built. Personally, I hope that people value my craftsmanship; so my personal websites all have code that I can identify myself with and that I'm proud of. So my portfolio includes a lot of gimmicks for kids, people, and likeminded people that they can explore and be fascinated with. [1] Coming full circle to what I hope the web could be: I think that a mixture of the Semantic aspects and today's Web Apps are necessary, and that this can only be achieved using swarm intelligence mechanisms. A centralized way is always too proprietary to outlive its creator. Combining that with a decentralized approach for training AIs on the labels could be a glimmer of hope that the web isn't lost yet. That's why I started to build Tholian and its Browser [2] [1] https://cookie.engineer https://cookie.engineer [2] https://tholian.network https://tholian.network
- robertoandred 6y ago
  JSX and clean semantic markup are not mutually exclusive.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

lmm 6y ago

> Did you know that screenreaders, palm PDAs and others all had support for it...and that publishing to a new platform was as easy as linking a new stylesheet? None of that HTML5 crap was necessary. No modernizr, no JS, no pixelperfect designs necessary. It just worked. XHTML 1.1 strict ran everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean even the mobile audiobook players that used the DAISY format. Fully automatically transformed, and voiced over content. And yet none of it really worked. CSS was never good enough because the layouts you need on different platforms require a different markup hierarchy, so either you write some transformations in CSS and some awkwardly coupled XSLT or you do everything in XSLT. But XSLT was awful for humans and awful for tools; I'm all for declarative sub-Turing languages (efforts like Dhall are wonderful) but XSLT is just bad at being one of them. Even if people made a transformation that worked for some pages, it'd fail for others, because it's impossible to write a transformation correctly for arbitrary input pages and testing every m*n combination of page + transformation is tedious and unrewarding. The only way you could make XSLT or CSS do the right thing is if your page markup was reliably consistent because you generated all your pages with the same program - but if you're generating everything from a common sources it's easier and more reliable to just generate whichever different versions of your page you want (mobile/print/whatever) from that. People don't actually know or care about the semantics of their pages. Designers want pixel-perfect layouts because they care much more about what their page looks like than what it says, and non-designers had to use the same techniques as designers because browsers were asleep at the wheel in how they handled unstyled pages.

blablabla123 6y ago
> People don't actually know or care about the semantics of their pages. Designers want pixel-perfect layouts because they care much more about what their page looks like than what it says, and non-designers had to use the same techniques as designers because browsers were asleep at the wheel in how they handled unstyled pages. When showing what possibilities there are, they are used no matter by whom. For instance when I showed what is possible with inline svg in React everybody in the team bought into that eventually. Also designers are (in contrast to artists) all about creating things considering a lot of constraints. Most web designers know at least basic html so it's possible to design for and therefore work with reusable markups To me XHTML failed because it was really painful to use (and still is). You forget one closing tag and everything fails. The amount of people using IDEs (or even XML editors) are still in the minority. On the other hand React proves that XML (JSX) can be used in a modern way. That's probably mostly due to the fact that it's not used in one big blob but modularized into more digestible pieces and the barrier to write custom functionality is really low

feralimal 6y ago

> Sadly modern day web browsers have such less support for it that they even dropped the media device targets from the CSS spec, which I think is morally wrong. 'Morally wrong'? This is an interesting phrase to use - are you able to explain more on this?

nullifidian 6y ago
What is there to explain? The decision to deprecate it harmed blind individuals. It's wrong to harm people, even by inaction, especially when you are a multi-billion (sometimes trillion) dollar quasi-monopolist...
- feralimal 6y ago
  I get you! This is something that impacted blind individuals. I didn't know. Thanks.

jxramos 6y ago

Exactly, full access to distilled primary source material!