8 ms·

Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History

60 points by tannhaeuser 5y ago

rektide 5y ago
Mailing List Link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 Transcription: http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt Pairs well with Brian Kardell's History of the Web series (2015), which covers some of these bits & is a delightful enjoyable read as well: https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-1.html https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-... Also, note, very little about "semantic web". The word semantic does not appear in the transcript (other than as the title).
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  The History of the Web series deserves its own post for sure. But going by the publication date, unlike the OP, it seems to end just before it all went south ;)
  - tuukkah 5y ago
    Part IV is the last in the series but is not linked (ends in the launch of Netscape 2 with Java, Javascript and the browser plugin API): https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-4.html https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-...
    - bkardell 5y ago
      Ah hey thanks for the shout outs :) FWIW Jay Hoffmann has been doin some posts on CSS Tricks https://css-tricks.com/category/history/ https://css-tricks.com/category/history/ and there are some other intersting things in this space too. If you like these, I also do some web history things on our Igalia chats podcasts, often with folks firsthand - one is in fact going to be a chat with Chris Wilson tomorrow at BlinkOn 15. I really enjoyed watching Simon's talk myself - a slightly different perspective of the last 30 years is also in this talk I gave https://youtu.be/dFsRz1PGjdw?list=PL_BRVuWxk8srToZ69z-_5vBJIHTZGFH7Q https://youtu.be/dFsRz1PGjdw?list=PL_BRVuWxk8srToZ69z-_5vBJI... .. It's got no playmobile figures, but a lot of gifs :)
- tuukkah 5y ago
  From the transcript (although it's more of an aside): "Some of the standards sprawl was specifically about the markup, but some of it was about building the Semantic Web or Web Services on top of that core. The layering wasn't always neat, especially for namespaces and schemas."
miguelrochefort 5y ago
I never understood why the semantic web failed. Is there anything better than RDF?
- abbe98 5y ago
  Did it fail or did it just turn out different from what many imagined? I mean RDF is alive and well and Schema.org is widely adopted.
  - notpachet 5y ago
    It failed to win hearts and minds, yes. Imagine a world where instead of HTML we were creating/consuming direct representations of our <blog posts / product listings / social media followers / etc>. Right now those direct representations exist, but only in the database schemata of their FAANG owners. We can infer what fields are in a Tweet, but we don't know. We can deduce the commonalities between Amazon product listings, and Ebay product listings, but those aren't formally codified. The closest we have are things like schema.org, which are really just translation layers that people run their own proprietary data models through in order to produce something interoperable. But we're certainly not using the interoperable representations everywhere; only when Google or some other big company has the financial incentive (and monopoly power) to mandate it. If, instead of a big inscrutable blob of HTML/JS/CSS, Amazon gave me the same shaped data for a product listing as Ebay does, then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing, across the entire internet.
    - cxr 5y ago
      > If, instead of a big inscrutable blob of HTML/JS/CSS, Amazon gave me the same shaped data for a product listing as Ebay does, then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing That would certainly be ideal, but uniformity is not a prerequisite for more powerful, user-serving interfaces. It doesn't always take special intent on the part of the site operator to end up providing a rich source of data; many sites end up doing it by accident. This is what's so great about HTML's class attribute. People often mistakenly think of classes as inherently having something to do with CSS. CSS is a carrot that often results in developers being encouraged to mark things up whether they buy in to the semantic argument or not[1]. Take a look at the video listings on pbs.org for an example of rich structure that can be readily mined by the UA. What's lacking is a generic tool that sits at about the same place as Excel on the power/expression spectrum and which allows the user to create and "train" an adapter (in a matter of seconds) for an arbitrary Web property. For example, given a list of videos and associated details (title, thumbnail, description, length, etc), point to two or more titles and your UA can, in an ML-free way, use those samples to examine the structure to create an adapter. To really make things tighten it up to an acceptable margin, it can even provide an editor that exposes the raw class names as UI so you can explicitly reconfigure the model as you please. This is a system that would not take an expert to use, at least not any more than the "expertise" that is required to recognize that, say, the table widgets in many apps allow you to sort data or rearrange/resize columns via drag and drop. 1. It's not perfect, because you have garbage-out fads that can come along and knee you in the stomach, like Tailwind CSS and compilers that generate meaningless class names, but there are short-term and long-term mitigations.
kjhughes 5y ago
First, here is a direct link to the title post (rather than to an index in which the intended post might be lost): http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html Second, this is not about the Semantic Web, despite 'Semantic' and 'Web' appearing together in the title. It's about the history of semantic markup, which is where markup is meant to describe what text is. (Since it's about "meaning", the word semantic is used.) Be sure to see the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8), presented by Simon St. Laurent at 2021 Balisage, a conference for markup specialists, if you are interested in the evolution of markup from SGML to HTML to XML to XHTML to HTML5. To whet your appetite for what the video is really about (not the Semantic Web), Simon starts like this: Hello, this a story where we, the fans of meaning conveyed by markup, mostly lose after a long winning streak. To soften the edges a bit, I'm telling the story with Playmobil figures... It's very well written and cleverly presented -- worth a watch if you're at all interested in the historical arc of markup.
- wrnr 5y ago
  Honestly I'm glad it failed, not in a misanthropic sense, but I think that the idea of xhtml was too ridged and therefore it failed. Other semantic projects have the same issue, not just RDF, but also Lojban, and even formal math. There needs to be some basic structure but outside of that the freedom for interpret and give meaning.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gerikson 5y ago
    I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was needed to authors was to use tools to write "source code" (like Markdown) and then "compilers" to transform that into XHTML. Then you needed to be able to verify that it was correct (otherwise you'd get an error message). As far as I know those tools were either immature, nonexistent or proprietary/expensive.
abathur 5y ago
(as someone currently picking at a semantic approach to granularly single-sourcing documentation...) I think there are a lot of small factors that create a big headwind for semantic markup, but I think the most important are: 1. Semantic markup can make it easy to build bigger/better levers, but a lot of these aren't universally useful. (They aren't compelling reasons for most people to suffer.) 2. There's no great starting point you can recommend to anyone from which they'll be able to incrementally improve their documents and start building levers without large up-front investments.

60 points by tannhaeuser 5y ago

Mailing List Link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 Transcription: http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt Pairs well with Brian Kardell's History of the Web series (2015), which covers some of these bits & is a delightful enjoyable read as well: https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-1.html https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-... Also, note, very little about "semantic web". The word semantic does not appear in the transcript (other than as the title).

tannhaeuser 5y ago
The History of the Web series deserves its own post for sure. But going by the publication date, unlike the OP, it seems to end just before it all went south ;)
- tuukkah 5y ago
  Part IV is the last in the series but is not linked (ends in the launch of Netscape 2 with Java, Javascript and the browser plugin API): https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-4.html https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-Part-...
  - bkardell 5y ago
    Ah hey thanks for the shout outs :) FWIW Jay Hoffmann has been doin some posts on CSS Tricks https://css-tricks.com/category/history/ https://css-tricks.com/category/history/ and there are some other intersting things in this space too. If you like these, I also do some web history things on our Igalia chats podcasts, often with folks firsthand - one is in fact going to be a chat with Chris Wilson tomorrow at BlinkOn 15. I really enjoyed watching Simon's talk myself - a slightly different perspective of the last 30 years is also in this talk I gave https://youtu.be/dFsRz1PGjdw?list=PL_BRVuWxk8srToZ69z-_5vBJIHTZGFH7Q https://youtu.be/dFsRz1PGjdw?list=PL_BRVuWxk8srToZ69z-_5vBJI... .. It's got no playmobile figures, but a lot of gifs :)
tuukkah 5y ago
From the transcript (although it's more of an aside): "Some of the standards sprawl was specifically about the markup, but some of it was about building the Semantic Web or Web Services on top of that core. The layering wasn't always neat, especially for namespaces and schemas."

miguelrochefort 5y ago

I never understood why the semantic web failed. Is there anything better than RDF?

abbe98 5y ago
Did it fail or did it just turn out different from what many imagined? I mean RDF is alive and well and Schema.org is widely adopted.
- notpachet 5y ago
  It failed to win hearts and minds, yes. Imagine a world where instead of HTML we were creating/consuming direct representations of our <blog posts / product listings / social media followers / etc>. Right now those direct representations exist, but only in the database schemata of their FAANG owners. We can infer what fields are in a Tweet, but we don't know. We can deduce the commonalities between Amazon product listings, and Ebay product listings, but those aren't formally codified. The closest we have are things like schema.org, which are really just translation layers that people run their own proprietary data models through in order to produce something interoperable. But we're certainly not using the interoperable representations everywhere; only when Google or some other big company has the financial incentive (and monopoly power) to mandate it. If, instead of a big inscrutable blob of HTML/JS/CSS, Amazon gave me the same shaped data for a product listing as Ebay does, then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing, across the entire internet.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > If, instead of a big inscrutable blob of HTML/JS/CSS, Amazon gave me the same shaped data for a product listing as Ebay does, then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing That would certainly be ideal, but uniformity is not a prerequisite for more powerful, user-serving interfaces. It doesn't always take special intent on the part of the site operator to end up providing a rich source of data; many sites end up doing it by accident. This is what's so great about HTML's class attribute. People often mistakenly think of classes as inherently having something to do with CSS. CSS is a carrot that often results in developers being encouraged to mark things up whether they buy in to the semantic argument or not[1]. Take a look at the video listings on pbs.org for an example of rich structure that can be readily mined by the UA. What's lacking is a generic tool that sits at about the same place as Excel on the power/expression spectrum and which allows the user to create and "train" an adapter (in a matter of seconds) for an arbitrary Web property. For example, given a list of videos and associated details (title, thumbnail, description, length, etc), point to two or more titles and your UA can, in an ML-free way, use those samples to examine the structure to create an adapter. To really make things tighten it up to an acceptable margin, it can even provide an editor that exposes the raw class names as UI so you can explicitly reconfigure the model as you please. This is a system that would not take an expert to use, at least not any more than the "expertise" that is required to recognize that, say, the table widgets in many apps allow you to sort data or rearrange/resize columns via drag and drop. 1. It's not perfect, because you have garbage-out fads that can come along and knee you in the stomach, like Tailwind CSS and compilers that generate meaningless class names, but there are short-term and long-term mitigations.

kjhughes 5y ago

First, here is a direct link to the title post (rather than to an index in which the intended post might be lost): http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html Second, this is not about the Semantic Web, despite 'Semantic' and 'Web' appearing together in the title. It's about the history of semantic markup, which is where markup is meant to describe what text is. (Since it's about "meaning", the word semantic is used.) Be sure to see the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8), presented by Simon St. Laurent at 2021 Balisage, a conference for markup specialists, if you are interested in the evolution of markup from SGML to HTML to XML to XHTML to HTML5. To whet your appetite for what the video is really about (not the Semantic Web), Simon starts like this: Hello, this a story where we, the fans of meaning conveyed by markup, mostly lose after a long winning streak. To soften the edges a bit, I'm telling the story with Playmobil figures... It's very well written and cleverly presented -- worth a watch if you're at all interested in the historical arc of markup.

wrnr 5y ago
Honestly I'm glad it failed, not in a misanthropic sense, but I think that the idea of xhtml was too ridged and therefore it failed. Other semantic projects have the same issue, not just RDF, but also Lojban, and even formal math. There needs to be some basic structure but outside of that the freedom for interpret and give meaning.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gerikson 5y ago
  I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was needed to authors was to use tools to write "source code" (like Markdown) and then "compilers" to transform that into XHTML. Then you needed to be able to verify that it was correct (otherwise you'd get an error message). As far as I know those tools were either immature, nonexistent or proprietary/expensive.

abathur 5y ago

(as someone currently picking at a semantic approach to granularly single-sourcing documentation...) I think there are a lot of small factors that create a big headwind for semantic markup, but I think the most important are: 1. Semantic markup can make it easy to build bigger/better levers, but a lot of these aren't universally useful. (They aren't compelling reasons for most people to suffer.) 2. There's no great starting point you can recommend to anyone from which they'll be able to incrementally improve their documents and start building levers without large up-front investments.