4 ms·

In reading this article, I found myself first completely agreeing with Berners-Lee, and then, completely agreeing with Norvig. I would love to see Berners-Lee

In reading this article, I found myself first completely agreeing with Berners-Lee, and then, completely agreeing with Norvig. I would love to see Berners-Lee vision come to life; however, I am not sure how to overcome the human vice elements Norvig is talking about.

jdavis703 5y ago
This is where editorial judgement comes in. It could either be highly centralized with Google or another search engine providing the curation. Or it could be farmed out using PKI, similar to how extended verification was done back in the day, except the verification is more encompassing of “human vice” and serves as a feedback signal for the search engine.
echelon 5y ago
> The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' This is the reason. The only reason. Google was the leader in this story. Google built infrastructure and intelligence to handle Norvig's other concerns: provenance and validity. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a major competitive advantage. Why would they want everyone on the internet to have Google powers at low cost? Wikipedia solves for these concerns. Open source does too. There's no reason we couldn't have had maintainers and curators and a distributed web of pubkey signing to vouch for good data. Most of the data would have been social by nature anyway, and sharing news and articles p2p would have been an early take at the fediverse. But broader than just the Twitter focus. Google launched the WHATWG partially to supplant the W3C and their semantic web push. They knee-capped XHTML and its strong semantics in favor of a loosely typed, messy, and forgiving HTML5. Because Google is one of only a few players that can deduce the semantics on their own. (They then pushed ahead unilaterally so that Chrome was dominant. They fashion the web into an image that suits them.) The Semantic Web would have threatened Google by lowering the barrier to entry to parties that wanted to connect and query data. Of course Google hates it.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. And Google themselves are working with schema.org to provide standards that endow web pages with strong semantics, along a semantic-web model - this is basically what's powering "rich" SERP results in Google and other search engines. That doesn't look like they "hate" the semantic web all that much.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    > HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. Perhaps I am not quite understanding what you mean but, HTML5 allows things that are not legal in XML. For example: <!doctype html> <html lang=en> <meta charset=utf-8> <title>Home – ACME, Inc.</title> <div id=outer-wrap> <header id=header-main> <h1><a href="/">ACME, Inc.</a></h1> <h2>Happy times</h2> </header> <nav id=navig-main> <ul> <li><a href="/">Home</a> <li><a href="/products/">Products</a> <li><a href="/blog/">Blog</a> <li><a href="/kb/">Knowledge Base</a> <li><a href="/support/">Support</a> <li><a href=/about.htm>About Us</a> </ul> </nav> <div id=content-main> <div class=quux> <h3>Etaoin shrdlu</h3> <p>Today is a nice day :) <p>Here are some <a href="http://www.example.com/">things we find important</a>: <ul> <li><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=foo">foo</a> <li>bar <li>baz </ul> </div> <article class=snippet> <header> <figure class=article-illustration-image-hero> <img src=/static/images/bees.jpg alt="Buzzing bees."> <figcaption>Buzzing bees.</figcaption> </figure> <h3>The Baz and the Bees</h3> </header> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. <p>Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. <p class=snippet-more><a href=/blog/2021/the-baz-and-the-bees.htm>Read more</a> </article> </div> <footer id=footer-main> <p>Copyright © 2021 ACME, Inc. </footer> </div> This above example is a complete, valid HTML5 document, and representative of how I like to write HTML using HTML5. I leave attributes unquoted where allowed. Mainly, as long as the attribute value does not contain space, equal sign, quote marks, or trailing slash, the value can be left unquoted and so I do. In XHTML this is not allowed. In XML I’m not sure. I omit closing tags where allowed. For example you see in the example above that I’ve left both the p tags and the li tags unclosed. In XML, this is not allowed. No XML schema and no DTD inside of the file itself. In HTML5 neither an XML schema nor a DTD is specified as part of the markup. In short, HTML5 as a whole is not valid XML. A subset of HTML5 may be valid XML. But a document can be valid HTML5 without being valid XML. Personally I like HTML5 a lot better than XHTML etc, exactly because the rules for HTML5 are so much more permissive than XHTML, so typing HTML5 by hand lets me type less to achieve the same and more than I did back before HTML5 existed.

jdavis703 5y ago

This is where editorial judgement comes in. It could either be highly centralized with Google or another search engine providing the curation. Or it could be farmed out using PKI, similar to how extended verification was done back in the day, except the verification is more encompassing of “human vice” and serves as a feedback signal for the search engine.

echelon 5y ago

> The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' This is the reason. The only reason. Google was the leader in this story. Google built infrastructure and intelligence to handle Norvig's other concerns: provenance and validity. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a major competitive advantage. Why would they want everyone on the internet to have Google powers at low cost? Wikipedia solves for these concerns. Open source does too. There's no reason we couldn't have had maintainers and curators and a distributed web of pubkey signing to vouch for good data. Most of the data would have been social by nature anyway, and sharing news and articles p2p would have been an early take at the fediverse. But broader than just the Twitter focus. Google launched the WHATWG partially to supplant the W3C and their semantic web push. They knee-capped XHTML and its strong semantics in favor of a loosely typed, messy, and forgiving HTML5. Because Google is one of only a few players that can deduce the semantics on their own. (They then pushed ahead unilaterally so that Chrome was dominant. They fashion the web into an image that suits them.) The Semantic Web would have threatened Google by lowering the barrier to entry to parties that wanted to connect and query data. Of course Google hates it.

zozbot234 5y ago
HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. And Google themselves are working with schema.org to provide standards that endow web pages with strong semantics, along a semantic-web model - this is basically what's powering "rich" SERP results in Google and other search engines. That doesn't look like they "hate" the semantic web all that much.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. Perhaps I am not quite understanding what you mean but, HTML5 allows things that are not legal in XML. For example: <!doctype html> <html lang=en> <meta charset=utf-8> <title>Home – ACME, Inc.</title> <div id=outer-wrap> <header id=header-main> <h1><a href="/">ACME, Inc.</a></h1> <h2>Happy times</h2> </header> <nav id=navig-main> <ul> <li><a href="/">Home</a> <li><a href="/products/">Products</a> <li><a href="/blog/">Blog</a> <li><a href="/kb/">Knowledge Base</a> <li><a href="/support/">Support</a> <li><a href=/about.htm>About Us</a> </ul> </nav> <div id=content-main> <div class=quux> <h3>Etaoin shrdlu</h3> <p>Today is a nice day :) <p>Here are some <a href="http://www.example.com/">things we find important</a>: <ul> <li><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=foo">foo</a> <li>bar <li>baz </ul> </div> <article class=snippet> <header> <figure class=article-illustration-image-hero> <img src=/static/images/bees.jpg alt="Buzzing bees."> <figcaption>Buzzing bees.</figcaption> </figure> <h3>The Baz and the Bees</h3> </header> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. <p>Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. <p class=snippet-more><a href=/blog/2021/the-baz-and-the-bees.htm>Read more</a> </article> </div> <footer id=footer-main> <p>Copyright © 2021 ACME, Inc. </footer> </div> This above example is a complete, valid HTML5 document, and representative of how I like to write HTML using HTML5. I leave attributes unquoted where allowed. Mainly, as long as the attribute value does not contain space, equal sign, quote marks, or trailing slash, the value can be left unquoted and so I do. In XHTML this is not allowed. In XML I’m not sure. I omit closing tags where allowed. For example you see in the example above that I’ve left both the p tags and the li tags unclosed. In XML, this is not allowed. No XML schema and no DTD inside of the file itself. In HTML5 neither an XML schema nor a DTD is specified as part of the markup. In short, HTML5 as a whole is not valid XML. A subset of HTML5 may be valid XML. But a document can be valid HTML5 without being valid XML. Personally I like HTML5 a lot better than XHTML etc, exactly because the rules for HTML5 are so much more permissive than XHTML, so typing HTML5 by hand lets me type less to achieve the same and more than I did back before HTML5 existed.