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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 ad
by 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 agoI 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.