Search and ontologies weren't the only goals. Microformats enabled standardized data markup that lots of applications could consume and understand. RSS and Ato

Search and ontologies weren't the only goals. Microformats enabled standardized data markup that lots of applications could consume and understand. RSS and Atom were semantic web formats. They had a ton of applications built to publish and consume them, and people found the formats incredibly useful. The idea was that if you ran into ingestible semantic content, your browser, a plugin, or another application could use that data in a specialized way. It worked because it was a standardized and portable data layer as opposed to a soup of meaningless HTML tags. There were ideas for a distributed P2P social network built on the semantic web, standardized ways to write articles and blog posts, and much more. If that had caught on, we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble continually reinventing the wheel. And perhaps we would be in a world without walled gardens.