Comments on: The (Failing) Semantic Web http://www.orangeninja.com/2007/05/12/the-failing-semantic-web/ Life, the Universe, and Everything In It Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:09:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 By: Justin Smith http://www.orangeninja.com/2007/05/12/the-failing-semantic-web/#comment-12 Justin Smith Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:31:04 +0000 http://www.orangeninja.com/2007/05/09/the-failing-semantic-web/#comment-12 I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that there's no perceived benefit for 99% of the population to add syntactically correct markup. Sure, that one percent of sites out there who can count a blind user as one of their patrons might see a benefit to ensuring that their product can be sold to him/her too, but when at least half of all sites (note I say sites, and not pages) are Joe Smith in his parent's basement raging against the machine about why he's grounded, there's never going to be a mass exodus to proper markup. The other part of the problem is, as you said, the WYSIWYG editors that already add scores of useless markup as it is. I don't think it's due to the lack of context, but rather the fact that there really isn't a single "standard". Sure there's HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1, but they are notoriously out of date, and as such, the separate browser developers like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera have taken it upon themselves to build upon them. The whole scenario is really a whole catch-22: how do the WYSIWYG editors add features if each browser has its own set of "quirks", how do the browser developers get rid of the quirks if there's no set standard, and how does a standard get implemented if no one who uses the WYSIWYG editors care anyways? I guess it's anyone's guess how we get ourselves out of this mess. I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that there’s no perceived benefit for 99% of the population to add syntactically correct markup. Sure, that one percent of sites out there who can count a blind user as one of their patrons might see a benefit to ensuring that their product can be sold to him/her too, but when at least half of all sites (note I say sites, and not pages) are Joe Smith in his parent’s basement raging against the machine about why he’s grounded, there’s never going to be a mass exodus to proper markup.

The other part of the problem is, as you said, the WYSIWYG editors that already add scores of useless markup as it is. I don’t think it’s due to the lack of context, but rather the fact that there really isn’t a single “standard”. Sure there’s HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1, but they are notoriously out of date, and as such, the separate browser developers like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera have taken it upon themselves to build upon them.

The whole scenario is really a whole catch-22: how do the WYSIWYG editors add features if each browser has its own set of “quirks”, how do the browser developers get rid of the quirks if there’s no set standard, and how does a standard get implemented if no one who uses the WYSIWYG editors care anyways?

I guess it’s anyone’s guess how we get ourselves out of this mess.

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