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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 intell

by 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

by nsonha 5y ago

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