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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

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.
- austincheney 5y ago
  The failures you speak to are a behavioral divide. XML, and its descendants, were largely the work of elite hobbyists. These are people who, more often than not, really cared about the technologies and applied the curation, details, and precision such care requires like much of open source. This speaks to incredible initiative and great refinement to build an epic palace. In the rest of the world nobody cares. It works or it doesn't. The end. Most software developers want to believe that they are really smart people, and they just might be, but that doesn't equate to effort. Learning and extending the world of XML takes effort. My experience sitting on both sides of that fence tells me that unless you have a domineering personal investment the only thing that matters in software is employability and the semantic web did not crack that code. Employability is a primitive binary equation often reduced to a few lines on a resume.

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.

austincheney 5y ago
The failures you speak to are a behavioral divide. XML, and its descendants, were largely the work of elite hobbyists. These are people who, more often than not, really cared about the technologies and applied the curation, details, and precision such care requires like much of open source. This speaks to incredible initiative and great refinement to build an epic palace. In the rest of the world nobody cares. It works or it doesn't. The end. Most software developers want to believe that they are really smart people, and they just might be, but that doesn't equate to effort. Learning and extending the world of XML takes effort. My experience sitting on both sides of that fence tells me that unless you have a domineering personal investment the only thing that matters in software is employability and the semantic web did not crack that code. Employability is a primitive binary equation often reduced to a few lines on a resume.