From the archives:
If there was ever an instance of technologists overengineering a solution without considering how it would be used to solve the problem, the Semantic Web is a great example.
Was reminded of this when I saw Dave Winer mention RDF. It was meant to be the future of the web — the original Web 3, before those peddling blockchain rubbish commandeered the name. I’m really glad that it went nowhere. Building for the web would’ve been bloody awful otherwise.
@lmika Agreed. Only bummer is that the spiritual successor to RDF, JSON-LD, is all through ActivityPub. Hope one day it can be simplified.
@manton Yeah, it’s a bit of shame to hear that those working on ActivityPub chose to adopt all this semantic web stuff.
@devilgate Oh, I think you’re thinking of semantic HTML markup: using things like headers and sections in HTML. That’s fine, I have absolutely no issues with that. I use that all the time.
No, what I was talking about were brand new XML standards introduced by W3C (I think) to describe the relationship of things. Think, author A wrote book B which was published by publishing house P, etc. These subject-verb-object relationships were all encoded in a standard called RDF, using URL-based identifiers for each one: authors and publishers would use their website URL for their identifier, for example, and there would also be a URL to identify the verb “publish”. But how do you define the verb “publish”? For that you would using another new standard built atop this, like ontologies. But to define things in ontologies required yet another standard. And up, and up the pile of standards goes.
This was around the time that XML was also the rage — like XHTML, XFroms, XSLT, SOAP — before everyone came to their senses and said “that’s it, no more of these standards. HTML5 from here on out.”
@devilgate @lmika @manton I thought the semantic web was the last gasp of “you’re holding your internet wrong”. It was never credible that no one involved had ever seen the “average Word document”.
@mmetcalfe Yeah, it felt a bit like that to me too. I got the feeling that those working on this, researchers and academics, were maybe a bit too excited about trying to establish standards for defining and encoding every bit of knowledge one could publish on the web. There seemed to me a lack of pragmatism and practical thinking involved.
@lmika Bingo. I see it as akin to the struggle to publish a vernacular bible. Was the web the property of a priestly class, or did it belong to everyone?