[HN Gopher] Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History
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       Semantics and the Web: An Awkward History
        
       Author : tannhaeuser
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2021-11-15 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lists.xml.org)
 (TXT) 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.
        
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