5 ms·

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.

by abbe98 5y ago

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.

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.

by 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.