3 ms·

It's not about people marking up HTML to add semantic data; that's never going to happen (and never should). HTML is a presentation layer designed for comsumpti

It's not about people marking up HTML to add semantic data; that's never going to happen (and never should). HTML is a presentation layer designed for comsumption by humans, and human presentation data is no place for semantic content because it's a view of the data meant for HUMANS, who will already understand the semantic meaning. "Semantic content" is about machines using common semantic identifiers in their public APIs so that their data sets can interoperate and be used as components for something bigger.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Fully agree with your criticism of "semantic HTML" though many frontend developers would (bogusly, IMO) assign HTML the role of "structure" rather than presentation which they believe CSS is for. But still, in practice, what's left of SemWeb (on the web) is used for marking up HTML for search engines, in the form of meta-tags, Open Graph annotations, location data, RDFa, microformats, etc. The question is, should they, when Google will preview their data in search results such that they don't get clicks? Which is exactly the problem with semantic technologies on the web.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  The "semantic web" in terms of how it's been applied to HTML is effectively DOA. The real power of semantic data (which hasn't been realized yet) is in letting computer intelligences communicate in an understandable fashion. Linking databases and data sources globally has been the wet dream of distributed systems advocates for decades, but we've had neither the power nor the use cases for such things. However, once big data AI gets hungry enough, you can bet that everyone will jump headlong into the new data mining frenzy that's coming once someone writes the first successful "data connector & broker" service (much like what Lycos and Altavista did for web search).

3 ms·

It's not about people marking up HTML to add semantic data; that's never going to happen (and never should). HTML is a presentation layer designed for comsumpti

by kstenerud 6y ago

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Fully agree with your criticism of "semantic HTML" though many frontend developers would (bogusly, IMO) assign HTML the role of "structure" rather than presentation which they believe CSS is for. But still, in practice, what's left of SemWeb (on the web) is used for marking up HTML for search engines, in the form of meta-tags, Open Graph annotations, location data, RDFa, microformats, etc. The question is, should they, when Google will preview their data in search results such that they don't get clicks? Which is exactly the problem with semantic technologies on the web.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  The "semantic web" in terms of how it's been applied to HTML is effectively DOA. The real power of semantic data (which hasn't been realized yet) is in letting computer intelligences communicate in an understandable fashion. Linking databases and data sources globally has been the wet dream of distributed systems advocates for decades, but we've had neither the power nor the use cases for such things. However, once big data AI gets hungry enough, you can bet that everyone will jump headlong into the new data mining frenzy that's coming once someone writes the first successful "data connector & broker" service (much like what Lycos and Altavista did for web search).