On the shoulders of giants…
A revolution, slowly, is happening to the Web.
Many call the changes that are occuring Web 2.0 and I think the analogy is quite useful. It seems that the Web has reached a degree of stability- browsers are relatively compliant and useful- stuff generally works, which opens up the opportunity for people to innovate.
One vision for the next iteration of the Web is called the Semantic Web. The idea is that we’ll build a web that is structured and meaningful (to computers, not humans). The vision for this comes from Tim Berners-Lee and is essentially distributed knowledge system based on a markup format called RDF, a way to encode logical statements in XML about anything. It is, of course, also extensible on the edges (meaning anyone can add content and meaning to it). That is, if they understand the formats.
The Semantic Web would be a discontinuity from the current Web that we all know, mainly because its primarily for machines and only secondarily for humans. I think we can do better.
The ideas I’m putting across are by no means new to many people, but I’ve been thinking about them this evening in response to a paper we read for class and would like to distill and summarize my viewpoint here.
The above paper presents some interesting technology built on a prototype Semantic Web. The problem is that their rationale for building the Semantic Web is wrong:
…because HTML marries content and presentation into a single representation..
Certainly, HTML can be an intermixing of content and presentation, but it doesn’t have to be- it actually shouldn’t be.
With the advent of CSS and XHTML, markup can now be semantic (notice lowercase ‘s’)- it can have meaningful structure which is independent of how the content is presented in a browser.
So, we already have a web- a web which can be used to create semantic content, yet is, at the same time, presentable to users in its native form. As Tantek Çelik has said, “users first, computers second.”
Going the route of the Semantic Web would be like throwing out the source code for a mature product and rewriting it from scratch. Ask Netscape how well that works!
The Revolution Has Begun
Led by Tantek Çelik, Matt Mullenweg, Eric Meyer, Kevin Marks and others who I’m sure I insult by omitting, a new set of standards, deemed microformats are appearing. These standards specify ways to markup XHTML in ways that give the content some meaning. Some examples include: Votelinks, NoFollow, hCard, hCalendar, podcasting, blogchalking, xfn, RelLicense, RelTag xFolk, and online news.
The promise of microformats is that they offer machine-usable data while at the same time providing human-usable, presentable content.
I think what we’re seeing is a stage of evolution which will have revolutionary impact. This movement toward having semantic, well structured markup which is separated from the presentation will have other fruit as well. In many ways, AJAX, the new buzzword that encompasses all sorts of cool client-side Javascript magic, has been enabled by the maturing of CSS.
Please, let’s forget about trying to build a new Semantic Web, let’s make the one we already have (and love) semantic.
The revolution will be evolutionary.
Viva la revolution!
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