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As I wish to become involved in the political arena known as web standards and their anarchic demon-child, the semantic web, it is time for me to say my piece, state my position and share my intentions.

My description of the semantic web as an “anarchic demon-child” says it all, I suppose. I can see it happening. We all want the web to be more meaningful. Unsurprisingly, we encounter difficulty agreeing on what is meant by that. So, rather than expend the effort coming to an agreement, we all go our own merry way until, one day, we find that our hoped-for knowledge web is a complete mess of misunderstanding. It’s always someone else’s fault too. We were always the ones doing the right thing so our only response to the new problem is to become entrenched and fight it out. We end up with evolution by natural selection which is, to me, an unreliable means to achieve such an important intellectual end. We can do better.

There is an obvious need for a broadly-accepted, well-defined standard for augmenting text with semantic information. If such exists I am unaware of it and thus I welcome any education on the subject anyone can offer me.

Lacking knowledge of any accepted standard and desiring a simple means to augment my published text with semantic information, I did what I would appear to have just complained about and went my own way. I did so in such a way as to deliberately minimise the impact of my choice upon others. Having no explicit standard with which to work forced me to fall back upon the next most reasonable position – not breaking any other standards. I want to improve the quality of my published text, not cause problems for myself and other people.

I assume, as evidenced by my behaviour, that it is OK not to use a standard through ignorance of its existence. I think it is still OK, but slightly less so, to misuse a known standard through ignorance, inexperience or carelessness.

It is perfectly reasonable to know that a standard exists and to choose not to use it at all. Not using a standard expresses an intention to ignore those who use the standard and vice versa.

What gripes me most is when people, no matter what their intentions, no matter how useful it may seem, unilaterally redefine parts of an existing standard to mean anything other than the intention of that standard. Such deliberate subversion of a standard fotally tucks everyone else trying to use it, including the subversives.

Sound comprehension of and careful adherence to basic web standards is the only way to create the necessary stable foundation upon which lasting semantic structures will overlay. They are the rock upon which we can build our “houses of knowledge”. They are not the houses themselves, nor are they the contents of those houses.

As to my intentions, they are humble. I shall build my house of knowledge no matter what. Others shall build theirs. If we choose to co-operate and share, so much the better. If I can do anything to help make that happen, I should be delighted.

This entry was posted by Libertus on January 1, 2006 at 7:16 pm under Outreach, Politics, Software. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

7 Comments

  1. Tim says:

    I must admit I am a bit puzzled. Your page declares itself as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but you have gone to considerable and specific effort to produce content does not adhere to the standard. This seems to sit a little uneasily with the opinions expressed within the page?

    January 2, 2006, 7:39 pm

  2. Libertus says:

    The validator does not ignore tags that a user-agent by requirements must, so it complains about them. I have not yet created a DTD for my tags, nor do I intend to at this early stage. XHTML 1.0/Transitional has no semantic aspect, yet my pages express semantic content. How can I win?

    Are my tags screwing with your browser in some way?

    Also, see the W3C validator help section on validity vs. conformance. My pages may not validate successfully against any defined syntax for XHTML but I intend them to be conformant with the standard.

    I should be able to formulate and declare a formal XML namespace for my tags, but that’s at a level way beyond my current knowledge and experience.

    January 2, 2006, 7:46 pm

  3. Tim says:

    You say “how can I win?” and then describe the means (the eXtensible bit).

    In any case, why are you serving useless tags out to browsers anyway? You are parsing your semantic tags I think – why not clean up after yourself and strip the redundant crap before sending the page to the browser?

    No, does not impact on my browser, but I remain a bit confused, I thought you were trying to say that you thought web standards were a good idea?

    January 2, 2006, 11:12 pm

  4. Libertus says:

    What makes you think the semantic tags are redundant?

    January 2, 2006, 11:27 pm

  5. Libertus says:

    There’s no pleasing the validators. I’ve added my XML namespace and even declared the content type to be ‘application/xhtml+xml’ but to no avail. The W3C validator rejects my namespace declaration as an invalid attribute!

    January 3, 2006, 1:06 am

  6. Tim says:

    Your tags are designed to tell your scripts where/when and how to hyperlink bits of text, once they have done that, they are redundant so you are just bloating your code and chewing up bandwidth to no purpose by sending them out.

    Unless you have some "Grand Plan" for browsers to all be reconfigured to do something with the tags?

    And, no, you are right, there is no pleasing validators. :(

    January 3, 2006, 6:53 pm

  7. Libertus says:

    My semantic tags are an integral part of my content and to remove them would be to change the meaning, so you can’t honestly expect me to think that’s a good idea. They do not generate the links – you do. Switch them off using the control panel if you don’t believe me.

    I think my tags explain what I mean far more that a hyperlink alone can. If I strip out the tags and just leave the link, what does it mean? A link is just a structural element with no semantic content, implied or otherwise.

    There is a “grand plan” but it’s not at all under my control whether it becomes a reality. I plan to write experimental Firefox plug-ins that understand my tags (especially is:money) but browsers are not my target audience – people are – and people don’t all use Firefox. I must primarily work within what the web standards say I may do and should expect all browsers to support.

    Thank goodness validators aren’t standards, then! I’m glad you poked me for the failed validation – it made me reassess that what I was doing was acceptable. On the other hand, you’ll note that nowhere on my site do I claim that anything will be valid to any standard. I’m a mad inventor prone to mistakes. I don’t want to be seen to be a hypocrite without defense.

    January 3, 2006, 7:47 pm

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