On 29 October 2014 19:00, FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de> wrote:
> As nice as this all sounds, this is far away from reality, making you
> sound more or less like Richard Stallman philosophing about the free
> software revolution now having been waiting 25 years to happen.
Indeed! I feel like it too, unfortunately. But, in my alternate
universe, I can picture systems running it quite happily :)
> Working in an advertising agency myself, I know the underlying issue
> with the semantic web: It looks great on the paper but in reality,
> people really want to have full freedom in how their sites are
> structured.
> As a company, same as in software development, usually not the
> best solution but the fastest (= cheapest in the short-term) one
> is desired. Having to work on giant HTML-shipwrecks every day and
> how many hours I am paid to do that, I see the importance of clean
> semantics, however, companies don't learn easily, let alone customers
> who don't know the matter (all websites look the same to them in the
> end).
I recognise that problem too; my thoughts currently is that there are
a finite set of underlying website structures and layouts that a
common set can represent most of them. I'm using the concept of
semantics to refer to a limited set but necessary subset to describe
the content but not to the complex extent that has been proposed with
semantic web ideas.
> To really introduce changes to the web, it would have to be carried
> out by a conglomerate of big corporations at best behind the major
> browsers pushing a common agenda forward (starting in the codebases).
> As soon as the major browsers support a new type of markup-language,
> which could be much easier to write and develop with, a real change
> could be made.
> However, philosophing about a new way won't help much as long as it
> hasn't hit the browsers themselves.
> Moving away from XML would be a blessing! It's what I'd consider
> the switch from Web 2.0 to 3.0.
The same reason that most wikipedia pages lead back to philosophy - we
need to start from somewhere! I think one potential method is for
some sort of interface/translator (for 'read-only' websites, this
would be the equivalent of a web scraper) between existing websites.
Of course writing the translators would need to be tailored per site,
although not necessarily difficult for a programmer, will suffer
difficulty of handling the sheer quantity of the web already out there
and the suckiness of the approach.
Cheers,
Ralph
--
Tai Chi Minh Ralph Eastwood
tcmreastwood_AT_gmail.com
Received on Wed Oct 29 2014 - 20:27:47 CET