[HN Gopher] Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History
___________________________________________________________________
 
Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History
 
Author : tannhaeuser
Score  : 18 points
Date   : 2021-11-15 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
 
web link (lists.xml.org)
w3m dump (lists.xml.org)
 
| rektide wrote:
| Mailing List Link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-
| dev/202109/msg00001.html
| 
| Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8
| 
| Transcription:
| http://simonstl.com/balisage/TRANSCRIPT09042021.txt
| 
| Pairs well with Brian Kardell's History of the Web series (2015),
| which covers some of these bits & is a delightful enjoyable read
| as well: https://bkardell.com/blog/Brief-ish-History-of-The-Web-
| Part-...
| 
| Also, note, very little about "semantic web". The word semantic
| does not appear in the transcript (other than as the title).
 
  | tannhaeuser wrote:
  | The History of the Web series deserves its own post for sure.
  | But going by the publication date, unlike the OP, it seems to
  | end just before it all went south ;)
 
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| I never understood why the semantic web failed.
| 
| Is there anything better than RDF?
 
  | abbe98 wrote:
  | Did it fail or did it just turn out different from what many
  | imagined?
  | 
  | I mean RDF is alive and well and Schema.org is widely adopted.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | austincheney wrote:
  | Two things killed it:
  | 
  | 1. The simultaneous emergence of walled gardens
  | 
  | 2. The concepts were too challenging for most developers to
  | fully grasp and too distant to inspire common interest.
  | 
  | You have to remember the web prior to 2005. Nobody had heard of
  | Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Google was just a search
  | engine and data auction. Most of the web displayed static
  | content dynamically generated by either ASP, PHP, or TCL. Most
  | of the people on here have probably never even heard of TCL.
  | 
  | Back then all the value of online businesses were some form of
  | payment processing, think ecommerce, or application processing
  | like data mining. The idea that the data itself had value aside
  | from the products and services it represented was known but not
  | fully realized. This wasn't even deliberate.
  | 
  | Emerging online services needed to generate revenue to repay
  | their investors and in most cases the only thing that stuck was
  | online advertising. You can show ads to anybody, but the more
  | precisely targeted those ads became and the more they followed
  | users across third party sites the more valuable they became.
  | You have to understand that in most cases these are high
  | quantity but nearly worthless transactions so anything that
  | could raise the value of a transaction is a really big deal.
  | This is how the walled gardens happened.
 
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-15 23:00 UTC)