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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.