February
2008
Semantic Road Block?
How is it that semantics on the web got so far and hit a road block? Is a question I’ve asked myself a few times and with new developers now never knowing tables for layout the framework for maintaining a semantic web is now there.
Semantics can be created but they need to be perpetuated. Most folks think the web moves forward at a lightning pace, but it’s not until you dig into the details that you see lack of support for just about anything you can think of and lack of understanding about certain sections of languages. When things do take off industry wide, the standards have been around for anywhere between 2 years and 6 years before widespread use. The web progresses not in smooth steps but only at times when folks have real problems to overcome and the time to overcome those challenges. The W3C certainly don’t move as fast as the folks who have a few spare nights to hack away at 3am scripts. So we (the industry as a whole) stutter forward like we’ve got the wrong fuel in our engines, while the high octane are off in the fast lane.
Semantics in HTML is only just getting off the starting grid. How many people know what a blockquote is, or that the em tag isn’t for italics? Let alone the CMS tools creating this code, that’s a whole different race entirely.
Efforts to create a more semantic web take too long from the W3C to get down to the average web developer in terms of language specifications. Is that why we have microformats? After all it’s not a trivial task to extend XHTML to create new tags and make it valid code, certainly that task won’t have been taught at universities, even in 2008 folks might just be learning how to order heading tags and why that’s important. We can’t wait until 2020 for the release of HTML5 just to make the semantic web work so we pop the bonnet of the car, look at what we have and create a new engine?
Microformats for me are perhaps a saving grace for the semantic web, if this is to work, anyone with an interest in the semantic web has to keep it simple, we can’t go extending XHTML without decent resources, documentation and academic support in universities and in the private sector training. So microformats could get us through the semantic traffic jam, or at the very least think about what markup we use.
Notice my lack of abbr tags? Imagine I’m not using wordpress but a Content Management System which doesn’t allow me to edit the HTML, let alone gain access to the markup to insert microformats!!!
