Semantic Markup
Redux
Mark Pilgrim doesn't understand the point I was
trying to make when I said he contradicted
himself by being both a proponent of Semantic
Markup and HTML. I'll try this again. The primary
goal of Semantic Markup is that content in
documents is associated with metadata (i.e. marked
up) in a way that provides meaningful information
about the content and does so in a way that is
easily machine processable. This is the difference
between <cite> and <i> or <b> and
<strong> in [X]HTML. It should be highlighted
that improving machine processability not human
readability is the driving force behind the
Semantic Web and Semantic Markup. For example, the
aforementioned tags are indistinguishable to the
eye when rendered in most browsers but not to
programs that process such HTML documents.
Although HTML is primarily about presentation of
content it does have a
few semantic elements of which
cite is one. For most people these are
extremely inadequate and fall far short of
describing the kind of semantics they would like to
add to their data. Some like Edd Dumbill have
suggested using HTML <span> elements and
class attributes as avenues of
adding semantics to markup although others like Joe
Gregorio have
found this clumsy.
Given that the W3C thinks XML
is the basis for RDF and the Semantic Web it
seems the general direction going forward is to
move towards replacing a WWW full of HTML documents
to one full of XML documents. Technologies like CSS
and XSLT already exist for making XML documents
palatable in browsers while RDF, DAML+OIL, OWL et
al can be used for creating and describing
ontologies that relate semantics of different
markup syntaxes in the various XML documents on the
web.
If you are for the Semantic Web, you are for an
XML Web not for an HTML one. An HTML Web, even one
full of uses of <span> and <cite> tags,
is a pale reflection of what a Semantic Web built
on XML can be. This is the contradiction I was
talking about.
However this is not to say that Mark's hack is not
cool, because it is nor is it to say that one
cannot write Semantic Markup with HTML because you
can.
#
Goldilocks
and the 3 News Aggregators
Steve Burnap aka ucblockhead
recently created an
online journal. This presented me with a
dilemma. Up until Steve's journal I could do all my
blog reading starting with Sam Ruby's
blog since every blog I read regularly was one
or two clicks away. Since I didn't want to deal
with managing two separate blogging experiences
plus Slashdot and K5 I decided to get a
News Aggregator. Just like Goldilocks, it took
three tries until I found the one that was just
right.- AmphetaDesk:
The first strike against this app was that it
runs a web server on your machine and your access
to the application is via local web pages. This
was not as irritating as finding out that almost
any UI change required refreshing the screen.
After watching the screen reload six times while
I deleted the default newsfeeds then imagining
doing that a few dozen times as I added RSS feeds
I quickly uninstalled it.
- Aggie:
I had high hopes for this app because it would
have been the first .NET application I'd have
used that wasn't written by myself or someone
else at work. I didn't even get far enough to
even see the UI because the app threw a
System.Net.WebException when I double clicked on
the icon. That's just sad.
- FeedReader:
This was mostly what I wanted. A Native UI with a
no frills yet clean interface. Check out the
screenshots. There are one or two features
I'd like to see improved but neither of them is
what I'd deem a showstopper.
Yesterday when picking what feeds to subscribe to
I amused myself by going over various blogs I read
casually with a critical eye as if I was
pretentious movie critic or wine critic. I remember
thinking, "Is this blog only full of links to stuff
I would have already read on 3 other blogs with
little if any comments or is this person an
insightful wiz with something to say". Next thing
you know I'll be using "hip" blogger buzzwords like
moblogging in a sentence that doesn't end
with peals of laughter.
#