[headcanon]

I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids"

To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc."

Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very different incentives.

Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google, but unless every browser got on board to break web pages that didn't conform to that standard, then people aren't going to fully follow it. Instead, browsers (correctly in my view) decided to be as flexible as possible to render pages in a best-effort way, because everyone had a slightly different way to build web pages.

I feel like people get too stuck on the "correct" way to do things, but the reality of computers, as is the reality of everything, is that there are lots of different ways to do things, and we need to have systems that are comfortable with handling that.

[roadside_picnic]

> Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google

Was this written by AI? I find it hard to believe anyone who was interested in Semantic Web would have not known it's origin (or at least that it's origin was not Google).

The concept of a Semantic web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (who hopefully everyone recognizes as the father of HTTP, WWW, HTML) in 1999 [0]. Google, to my knowledge, had no direct development or even involvement in the early Semweb standards such as RDF [1] and OWL [2]. I worked with some of the people involved in the latter (not closely though), and at the time Google was still quite small.

0. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html

2. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/

[headcanon]

That was a human-generated hallucination, my apologies. I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future.

W3C of course deserves credit for their hard work on this standard.

My main point was that regardless of the semantic "standard", nothing prevented us from putting everything in a generic div, so complaining that everyone's just "not on board" isn't a useful lament.

[tjr]

Some ideas going back even further than that, like 1994:

https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old

[Barrin92]

>was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee

he's actually still working on it: https://solidproject.org/

[fouc]

"Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google", sorry that's false. They only contributed a bit towards it.

Tim Berners-Lee coined it in 1999 and further expanded on the concept in a 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila.

[rco8786]

The phrase “if everyone just” is an automatic trigger for me. Everyone is never going to just. A different solution to whatever the problem is will be necessary.

[gopher_space]

I can't find a copy of the old "reasons your solution to email spam won't work" response checklist, but one of the line items was "fails to account for human nature".

[ajkjk]

eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody externally has any standards, and the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better?

What happens in practice is that the culture exterminates the drive for improvement: not only are things bad, but people look at you if you're crazy if you think things should be better. Like in 2025 people defend C, people defend Javascript, people write software without types, people write scripts in shell languages; debugging sometimes involves looking at actual bytes with your eyes; UIs are written in non-cross-platform ways; the same stupid software gets written over and over at a million companies, sending a large file to another person is still actually pretty hard; leaving comments on it is functionally impossible ... these are software problems, everything is shit, everything can be improved on, nothing should be hard anymore but everything still is; we are still missing a million abstractions that are necessary to make the world simple. Good lord, yesterday I spent two hours trying to resize a PDF. We truly live in the stone age; the only progress we've made is that there are now ads on every rock.

I really wish it was a a much more ruthlessly competitive landscape. One in which if your software is bad, slow, hard to debug, hard to extend, not open source, not modernized, not built on the right abstractions, hard to migrate on or off of, not receptive to feedback, covered in ads... you'd be brutally murdered by the competition in short order. Not like today where you can just lie on your marketing materials and nobody can really do anything because the competition is just as weak. People would do a much better job if they had to to survive.

[laserlight]

> the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better?

I'll raise. The money flows because you do a bad job. Doing a good job is costly and takes time. The money cannot invest that much time and resources. Investing time and resources builds an ordinary business. The money is in for the casino effect, for the bangs. Pull the arm and see if it sticks. If yes, good. Keep pulling the arm. If not, continue with another slot machine.

[BobaFloutist]

Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....

[Quarrelsome]

we have to accept that the vast majority of people don't think like us. They don't think its complete garbage because they can't look hard enough to appreciate that fidelity.

While it might be better if everyone thought like us and wanted things to be _fundamentally_ good, most people don't, and most people money >> less people money and the difference in scale is vast. We could try to build a little fief where we get to set the rules but network effects are against us. If anything our best shot is to try to reverse the centralisation of the internet because that's a big cause of enshittification.

[justincormack]

The semantic web came out of work on Prolog and formal systems for AI which just didnt work well... LLMs and vector databases give us new tools that are pretty usable.

[cestith]

Imagine how easy it would be to build and train an AI if it had semantically tagged input all over the Web.

[m463]

I also think...

mom: "you need to clean up your room"

kid: "mom, just give up. The room will always be a mess, just use search"

[discostrings]

I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.

[cestith]

Neither broke web pages, honestly. XHTML requires a DTD named at the top of the document, and browsers will happily fall back to HTML 3, 4, or 5 as they can if there’s no DTD specified.