12 ms·

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.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    > then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing And Amazon / eBay / Twitter / Facebook brand identity would be worth so very much less. Amazon doesn't want you to think about a product on their website as interchangeable with a product from eBay or WalMart, they want you to think about their product listing i.e. the listing of the product surrounded by the Amazon Experience. Likewise, Twitter doesn't want you to think of a tweet as a bit of content equivalent to or interchangable with a toot from mastadon or post from Facebook; Twitter wants you to see the Tweet (the content within the context of using Twitter). It is a bit like calling Disney World a theme park. Sure, it has roller coasters and stuff, but describing a thing is not experiencing it.
    - notpachet 5y ago
      > And Amazon / eBay / Twitter / Facebook brand identity would be worth so very much less. Sounds great!
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        Sure, if you had a magical fiat wand to make it happen, go for it. The reality is, it won't happen, because average consumers don't care and the big producers and suppliers don't benefit from it at all- quite the opposite. The apocryphal lessons of the betamax vs vhs wars seem to never be learned- no matter how elegant or technically superior something is, it is the "whole product" that matters.
        notpachet 5y ago
        I don't see this as a market adoption problem; I see it as a regulation problem. This is why we have governments: to enact legislation that requires companies to not run roughshod over the public interest. Regulation is the magical fiat wand. I know that HN's views of GDPR are all over the place, but the reality is that it is possible to enact meaningful legislation to restrict the powers of tech companies, and magnify the power of the end user. You could make the same argument that the average user doesn't care about the data protection measures that GDPR provides. And the corporate interests definitely chafe at those requirements today.
  - miguelrochefort 5y ago
    You just described the semantic web. It’s beautiful. Now why did it fail?
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      Misaligned incentives, where those who can implement it don't have a motivation to do it well (either because they don't have a motivation at all because there's some cost and no direct benefit, or they have a motivation to explicitly ensure that it fails and people stay in their walled garden, or they have motivation to publish untrue manipulated data) and those who would benefit (i.e. advanced users, which is a niche) don't have the influence to make it happen. As the parent poster says, an effect could be "then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing, across the entire internet. " - from the perspective of any major site providing product listings, that's not a good thing, it quite clearly says that it would transfer power from the site to the user, and the sites do not want that. For them, becoming a source of "generic product listings" would be a horrible strategic failure, destroying a foundation of their business model and so it would be worth spending a lot of money to ensure that their site does not work with any standard promising this effect and/or that the standard fails to exist in the first place. So the key concept is that if you want to improve interoperability and the proposal to get there (e.g. Semantic Web) requires content providers to do some work, then it's inevitably going to fail, because the major content providers do not want interoperability - the up-and-coming content providers might want interoperability to gain users from the major existing ones, but only until they gain marketshare themselves.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
austincheney 5y ago
Two things killed it: 1. The simultaneous emergence of walled gardens 2. The concepts were too challenging for most developers to fully grasp and too distant to inspire common interest. You have to remember the web prior to 2005. Nobody had heard of Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Google was just a search engine and data auction. Most of the web displayed static content dynamically generated by either ASP, PHP, or TCL. Most of the people on here have probably never even heard of TCL. Back then all the value of online businesses were some form of payment processing, think ecommerce, or application processing like data mining. The idea that the data itself had value aside from the products and services it represented was known but not fully realized. This wasn't even deliberate. Emerging online services needed to generate revenue to repay their investors and in most cases the only thing that stuck was online advertising. You can show ads to anybody, but the more precisely targeted those ads became and the more they followed users across third party sites the more valuable they became. You have to understand that in most cases these are high quantity but nearly worthless transactions so anything that could raise the value of a transaction is a really big deal. This is how the walled gardens happened.
- zcw100 5y ago
  I'll add a twist to it. It failed in the worst possible way evidenced by the difficulty in explaining why it failed. It spread the failure out so evenly that there was no single thing that was broken or wrong but just about everything had some fundamental failure. I'm not talking about an edge case or a bug or underspecification but a fundamental conceptual failure. They weren't glaring so that if you explained the idea to someone you'd go, "oh wow, that sounds really interesting" but it wasn't until you went to use it that these problems would start to show. Because it wasn't any single problem it was very easy for the community to ignore them or to attack people who pointed them out and almost impossible to fix since you'd have to make changes everywhere. This would have been obvious to anyone trying to build even a trivial application. Just try to build a todo list, recipe application, calendar, etc. It will be like walking in quicksand. It will start out great and then every step will be slower than the last until you're expending huge amounts of effort to just make the next step and in the end you'll see what you've got and realize that you expended a ton of energy to make someone else's life easier and even that won't necessarily be clear. Performance will probably be dismal and there's little hope that it will scale at all.
ghaff 5y ago
The semantic web (the original Web 3.0) was mostly a formal top-down/academic/librarian approach to indexing information. When Tim Berners-Lee won the Draper prize, his talk was basically about the Semantic Web. But even more informal tags/folksonomies (think services like del.icio.us initially) never really took off. Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. Pretty much only researchers (like Sir TBL) do as well as journalists, analysts, etc.
- pydry 5y ago
  >Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. The very fact that some people often do it for free when the value is mostly captured and extracted by mainstream corporations suggests otherwise. Those same corporations have a strong preference for passivity, exhibited by their preference for the term "consumer". I thought the most hilarious demonstration of this tendency to try and train users in to passivity was exhibited by the flamboyant VC-inspired suicide of Digg.
- HKH2 5y ago
  > Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. Consumers hardly ever get given the tools to curate content apart from upvotes, downvotes, and maybe comments which they can put hashtags in, and even those often get taken away or rendered useless.
- nsonha 5y ago
  I think Google should have some interest in it as it might be able to make search engine indexing more efficient? Didn't they promote it as SEO?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mdaniel 5y ago
    It's not past-tense, they are currently: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... and https://schema.org/ https://schema.org/
technobabbler 5y ago
It was a lot of work for no real benefit. Nobody cared to parse that stuff or display it in a popular, customizable way, unlike RSS or Atom, both of which also died. Eventually Google's natural language-esque search just got big enough that no other interface to the web really mattered anymore, and their speciality was in parsing unstructured text & messy HTML into simple phrases. Better semantics might've helped other spiders, but by that point nobody cared about other spiders anymore. For things like social sharing, OpenGraph had the commercial support of Facebook and Twitter and was far simpler to implement. And other communities, like MediaWiki, used RDF only for the low-hanging fruit (Wikidata) while the most valuable info was still locked behind freeform blobs of text (Wikipedia). The semantic web took more effort to implement than the crap it usually describes. Most humans just don't really want to waste time classifying stuff. The communities that do (science, pirate communities, libraries, etc.) already have their own classification schemes. There was just no need for another web-only classification scheme, no popular desire for it, no sufficient commercial interest behind it, no end-user advantage of using it over HTML... is it surprising that it failed? It tried to solve a problem nobody really had, using a solution that was quickly eclipsed by machine learning. And for the few actors (search engines, social networks) who actually wanted effective classifications, their own algorithms were both more effective and more private, not relying on/enabling their competitors. Open classification excites librarians and archivists, maybe, and nobody else.
- alexvoda 5y ago
  Why do you believe certain comunities do have an interest in classifying stuff?
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    For professional needs? To enhance searchability or discoverability? For archiving? They enjoy it? But they tend to come up with their own classification schemes. The idea of a interoperable semantic web wasn't a bad one, there just was no real presentation layer for it, and no popular demand for it without one. However Amazon, Spotify, libraries, etc. classify their stuff internally, to their eventual end-users, the data is transformed into a HTML or app frontend of their design. Users don't see the underlying classification schema, just the product pages or book search or whatever. Sure, you could probably use XSLT to transform a semantic document into pretty HTML, but most companies went the other way of using custom code to read data and output unstructured markup, because it was easier and faster. HTML and JS "standards" evolved way quicker than RDF could keep up with. Beyond that, had there been a web-wide search engine that could easily let you search by classifications, microdata might've been helpful. But that never became popular. Closest thing I know of is Wolfram Alpha, and that uses its own algorithms and classifications too. shrug What do you think?
roca 5y ago
In most cases there was no immediate payoff to Web authors who added semantic markup to their sites. Also, there was no negative feedback for Web authors who added incorrect semantic markup to their sites. So the economics were always going to lead to semantic markup being either not present or corrupt --- useless either way. The only reason it was tried at all is because a large chunk of the Web standards community believed they could ignore economics and rule Web authors by decree. This belief is so attractive that even today you can regularly find HN commenters who hold it ... the ones who complain about the way the Web is and argue that browser vendors or standards bodies should make Web devs behave differently.
- acdha 5y ago
  I think you’re right: it never reached the point where you could go to your boss and say “implementing this will allow us to do this concrete thing” — contrast with schema.org’s much better adoption curve because it gave better Google ranking & display. One contributing factor was that the semweb community really needed more working engineers. I tried a few times to implement things and you could very quickly end up in cases where the documentation in 5 places was inconsistent and the lone example on some random W3C page didn’t work with the one available tool or hadn’t been maintained in so long that some other random XML spec had mutated incompatibly. Things like that really pumped up the cost of what was already a dubious proposition.
nsonha 5y ago
why would/should it succeed? You pick an unstructured reprerentation of the content (html) and say we put semantic markers in here, and hope that somehow intelligent systems will filter out all the other garbage and be able to parse it as structured data? Why don't you put the semantic marker at the source of the content where it's actually structured? Such as endpoints that return semantic content in json?
- acdha 5y ago
  Embedding it in HTML is the easy part. The hard part is having semantic data in the first place and being able to reconcile your view of the world with other people’s well enough to see a real benefit from all of that work. The implementations I saw were basically just a case of hoping they’d guessed at what other people needed well enough and waiting to see if someone used it. Changing the serialization format wouldn’t have changed that dynamic.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    That’s not my point, the point is semantic markup is a dirty and hopeless way of communication between agents, they should have dedicated endpoints
    - acdha 5y ago
      Again, my point was simply that that's the least important part of the problem. It's very easy to get structured data out of HTML, it's useful to scripts running in that page, and there's a real value to having the data you expect machines to use to be the same values which humans see to avoid potential discrepancies. The reason you can tell that it's not the format is that this hasn't changed as API-only services became commonplace. The problem preventing collaboration wasn't that people were putting structure in HTML but that businesses didn't see an advantage in doing so.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        > businesses didn't see an advantage in doing so. this is the problem, but it's magnified by the fact that you put responsibility in the hand of content makers and web developers, of course they are not interested in this. If you reframe this around making inteligent systems talk to eachother, separated from the web stuff, then the incentive is clearer to whoever has it, those who want to make themselves visible to mash-up services, aggregators, e-commerce, booking systems and what not

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.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  > then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing And Amazon / eBay / Twitter / Facebook brand identity would be worth so very much less. Amazon doesn't want you to think about a product on their website as interchangeable with a product from eBay or WalMart, they want you to think about their product listing i.e. the listing of the product surrounded by the Amazon Experience. Likewise, Twitter doesn't want you to think of a tweet as a bit of content equivalent to or interchangable with a toot from mastadon or post from Facebook; Twitter wants you to see the Tweet (the content within the context of using Twitter). It is a bit like calling Disney World a theme park. Sure, it has roller coasters and stuff, but describing a thing is not experiencing it.
  - notpachet 5y ago
    > And Amazon / eBay / Twitter / Facebook brand identity would be worth so very much less. Sounds great!
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Sure, if you had a magical fiat wand to make it happen, go for it. The reality is, it won't happen, because average consumers don't care and the big producers and suppliers don't benefit from it at all- quite the opposite. The apocryphal lessons of the betamax vs vhs wars seem to never be learned- no matter how elegant or technically superior something is, it is the "whole product" that matters.
      - notpachet 5y ago
        I don't see this as a market adoption problem; I see it as a regulation problem. This is why we have governments: to enact legislation that requires companies to not run roughshod over the public interest. Regulation is the magical fiat wand. I know that HN's views of GDPR are all over the place, but the reality is that it is possible to enact meaningful legislation to restrict the powers of tech companies, and magnify the power of the end user. You could make the same argument that the average user doesn't care about the data protection measures that GDPR provides. And the corporate interests definitely chafe at those requirements today.
- miguelrochefort 5y ago
  You just described the semantic web. It’s beautiful. Now why did it fail?
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Misaligned incentives, where those who can implement it don't have a motivation to do it well (either because they don't have a motivation at all because there's some cost and no direct benefit, or they have a motivation to explicitly ensure that it fails and people stay in their walled garden, or they have motivation to publish untrue manipulated data) and those who would benefit (i.e. advanced users, which is a niche) don't have the influence to make it happen. As the parent poster says, an effect could be "then as a user I would have a lot more power over how my browser represents any generic product listing, across the entire internet. " - from the perspective of any major site providing product listings, that's not a good thing, it quite clearly says that it would transfer power from the site to the user, and the sites do not want that. For them, becoming a source of "generic product listings" would be a horrible strategic failure, destroying a foundation of their business model and so it would be worth spending a lot of money to ensure that their site does not work with any standard promising this effect and/or that the standard fails to exist in the first place. So the key concept is that if you want to improve interoperability and the proposal to get there (e.g. Semantic Web) requires content providers to do some work, then it's inevitably going to fail, because the major content providers do not want interoperability - the up-and-coming content providers might want interoperability to gain users from the major existing ones, but only until they gain marketshare themselves.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

austincheney 5y ago

Two things killed it: 1. The simultaneous emergence of walled gardens 2. The concepts were too challenging for most developers to fully grasp and too distant to inspire common interest. You have to remember the web prior to 2005. Nobody had heard of Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Google was just a search engine and data auction. Most of the web displayed static content dynamically generated by either ASP, PHP, or TCL. Most of the people on here have probably never even heard of TCL. Back then all the value of online businesses were some form of payment processing, think ecommerce, or application processing like data mining. The idea that the data itself had value aside from the products and services it represented was known but not fully realized. This wasn't even deliberate. Emerging online services needed to generate revenue to repay their investors and in most cases the only thing that stuck was online advertising. You can show ads to anybody, but the more precisely targeted those ads became and the more they followed users across third party sites the more valuable they became. You have to understand that in most cases these are high quantity but nearly worthless transactions so anything that could raise the value of a transaction is a really big deal. This is how the walled gardens happened.

zcw100 5y ago
I'll add a twist to it. It failed in the worst possible way evidenced by the difficulty in explaining why it failed. It spread the failure out so evenly that there was no single thing that was broken or wrong but just about everything had some fundamental failure. I'm not talking about an edge case or a bug or underspecification but a fundamental conceptual failure. They weren't glaring so that if you explained the idea to someone you'd go, "oh wow, that sounds really interesting" but it wasn't until you went to use it that these problems would start to show. Because it wasn't any single problem it was very easy for the community to ignore them or to attack people who pointed them out and almost impossible to fix since you'd have to make changes everywhere. This would have been obvious to anyone trying to build even a trivial application. Just try to build a todo list, recipe application, calendar, etc. It will be like walking in quicksand. It will start out great and then every step will be slower than the last until you're expending huge amounts of effort to just make the next step and in the end you'll see what you've got and realize that you expended a ton of energy to make someone else's life easier and even that won't necessarily be clear. Performance will probably be dismal and there's little hope that it will scale at all.

ghaff 5y ago

The semantic web (the original Web 3.0) was mostly a formal top-down/academic/librarian approach to indexing information. When Tim Berners-Lee won the Draper prize, his talk was basically about the Semantic Web. But even more informal tags/folksonomies (think services like del.icio.us initially) never really took off. Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. Pretty much only researchers (like Sir TBL) do as well as journalists, analysts, etc.

pydry 5y ago
>Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. The very fact that some people often do it for free when the value is mostly captured and extracted by mainstream corporations suggests otherwise. Those same corporations have a strong preference for passivity, exhibited by their preference for the term "consumer". I thought the most hilarious demonstration of this tendency to try and train users in to passivity was exhibited by the flamboyant VC-inspired suicide of Digg.
HKH2 5y ago
> Mainstream consumers have zero interest in curating content. Consumers hardly ever get given the tools to curate content apart from upvotes, downvotes, and maybe comments which they can put hashtags in, and even those often get taken away or rendered useless.
nsonha 5y ago
I think Google should have some interest in it as it might be able to make search engine indexing more efficient? Didn't they promote it as SEO?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mdaniel 5y ago
  It's not past-tense, they are currently: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... and https://schema.org/ https://schema.org/

technobabbler 5y ago

It was a lot of work for no real benefit. Nobody cared to parse that stuff or display it in a popular, customizable way, unlike RSS or Atom, both of which also died. Eventually Google's natural language-esque search just got big enough that no other interface to the web really mattered anymore, and their speciality was in parsing unstructured text & messy HTML into simple phrases. Better semantics might've helped other spiders, but by that point nobody cared about other spiders anymore. For things like social sharing, OpenGraph had the commercial support of Facebook and Twitter and was far simpler to implement. And other communities, like MediaWiki, used RDF only for the low-hanging fruit (Wikidata) while the most valuable info was still locked behind freeform blobs of text (Wikipedia). The semantic web took more effort to implement than the crap it usually describes. Most humans just don't really want to waste time classifying stuff. The communities that do (science, pirate communities, libraries, etc.) already have their own classification schemes. There was just no need for another web-only classification scheme, no popular desire for it, no sufficient commercial interest behind it, no end-user advantage of using it over HTML... is it surprising that it failed? It tried to solve a problem nobody really had, using a solution that was quickly eclipsed by machine learning. And for the few actors (search engines, social networks) who actually wanted effective classifications, their own algorithms were both more effective and more private, not relying on/enabling their competitors. Open classification excites librarians and archivists, maybe, and nobody else.

alexvoda 5y ago
Why do you believe certain comunities do have an interest in classifying stuff?
- technobabbler 5y ago
  For professional needs? To enhance searchability or discoverability? For archiving? They enjoy it? But they tend to come up with their own classification schemes. The idea of a interoperable semantic web wasn't a bad one, there just was no real presentation layer for it, and no popular demand for it without one. However Amazon, Spotify, libraries, etc. classify their stuff internally, to their eventual end-users, the data is transformed into a HTML or app frontend of their design. Users don't see the underlying classification schema, just the product pages or book search or whatever. Sure, you could probably use XSLT to transform a semantic document into pretty HTML, but most companies went the other way of using custom code to read data and output unstructured markup, because it was easier and faster. HTML and JS "standards" evolved way quicker than RDF could keep up with. Beyond that, had there been a web-wide search engine that could easily let you search by classifications, microdata might've been helpful. But that never became popular. Closest thing I know of is Wolfram Alpha, and that uses its own algorithms and classifications too. shrug What do you think?

roca 5y ago

In most cases there was no immediate payoff to Web authors who added semantic markup to their sites. Also, there was no negative feedback for Web authors who added incorrect semantic markup to their sites. So the economics were always going to lead to semantic markup being either not present or corrupt --- useless either way. The only reason it was tried at all is because a large chunk of the Web standards community believed they could ignore economics and rule Web authors by decree. This belief is so attractive that even today you can regularly find HN commenters who hold it ... the ones who complain about the way the Web is and argue that browser vendors or standards bodies should make Web devs behave differently.

acdha 5y ago
I think you’re right: it never reached the point where you could go to your boss and say “implementing this will allow us to do this concrete thing” — contrast with schema.org’s much better adoption curve because it gave better Google ranking & display. One contributing factor was that the semweb community really needed more working engineers. I tried a few times to implement things and you could very quickly end up in cases where the documentation in 5 places was inconsistent and the lone example on some random W3C page didn’t work with the one available tool or hadn’t been maintained in so long that some other random XML spec had mutated incompatibly. Things like that really pumped up the cost of what was already a dubious proposition.

nsonha 5y ago

why would/should it succeed? You pick an unstructured reprerentation of the content (html) and say we put semantic markers in here, and hope that somehow intelligent systems will filter out all the other garbage and be able to parse it as structured data? Why don't you put the semantic marker at the source of the content where it's actually structured? Such as endpoints that return semantic content in json?

acdha 5y ago
Embedding it in HTML is the easy part. The hard part is having semantic data in the first place and being able to reconcile your view of the world with other people’s well enough to see a real benefit from all of that work. The implementations I saw were basically just a case of hoping they’d guessed at what other people needed well enough and waiting to see if someone used it. Changing the serialization format wouldn’t have changed that dynamic.
- nsonha 5y ago
  That’s not my point, the point is semantic markup is a dirty and hopeless way of communication between agents, they should have dedicated endpoints
  - acdha 5y ago
    Again, my point was simply that that's the least important part of the problem. It's very easy to get structured data out of HTML, it's useful to scripts running in that page, and there's a real value to having the data you expect machines to use to be the same values which humans see to avoid potential discrepancies. The reason you can tell that it's not the format is that this hasn't changed as API-only services became commonplace. The problem preventing collaboration wasn't that people were putting structure in HTML but that businesses didn't see an advantage in doing so.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      > businesses didn't see an advantage in doing so. this is the problem, but it's magnified by the fact that you put responsibility in the hand of content makers and web developers, of course they are not interested in this. If you reframe this around making inteligent systems talk to eachother, separated from the web stuff, then the incentive is clearer to whoever has it, those who want to make themselves visible to mash-up services, aggregators, e-commerce, booking systems and what not