If the next "version" of the web is all about semantics, why aren't more people using microformats?
What it says above. Or if not microformats, then something else.
I find it far more likely that we'll have built a practical AI before the semantic web ever happens, at which point all semantic efforts will be obsolete.
Of course, if there's anything more masturbatory than the semantic web, it's microformats. Hey! You there! Don't link to a vcard object, that's yesterday's deal. Instead, painstakingly reproduce your vcard in XML! Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it. Lets take a widely supported data format that many people already have, and turn it in to a completely unsupported, poorly specified fantasy format. Then you can maintain two copies of the same data! Endless fun.
It's just a symptom of the general web malaise. Am I crazy or was it once possible for real human beings to write web pages? You know, before you had to remember 90 pages of how CSS worked? The W3C these days seems to be where small minds go to die, and even TBL isn't helping.
I think the idealists are on to something, but as usual they are whacking off over the thought that one day everything will be semantic. That's the pipedream to which you rightly refer. What I said above will not take place for many home-spun sites or apps or businesses that can't justify the cost with added value or increased revenue.
It's perfectly reasonable for, say, a CMS to semantically mark up when an article was posted. That's free. The server knows the date, so why not? It's not hurting anyone. Similarly, a camera with a GPS chip could easily add LAT/LONG EXIF metadata to every photo, except for the power, that's free too. You could use that to answer queries like "give me all photos taken in Laos in the past year", for example. Nothing wrong with that.
Where it breaks down is that there isn't enough free metadata to make the semantic web worthwhile. It relies on people actually saying "This is an address I'm typing right now... this is the street component of the address... This is the City..." It's ridiculous. Certainly, there'll be special purpose applications making use of free metadata in the future, but the whole web being semantic will never happen.
I agree with you that the average user (which includes business, etc.) will not do it significantly unless it's effortless so I wonder if app platforms or frameworks can make it more effortless in this way. That combined with some level of justified business value in some sectors could be our best stab at a practically, usefully, partially semantic web.
Being pragmatic, I'm not one to say that unless the whole web is semantic then we give up. I'm also not one to believe the whole web will be semantic or that all of it really needs to be.
Also, Google doesn't parse addresses at all, it uses its index data the same way it does spell checking.
Remember, there are an awful lot of sites with database back ends that store structured data. The technical difficulty of emitting that structured data out into a web page using a microformat (or RDFa, or whatever) is going to be pretty low, so if it's useful (for SEO or anything else), I expect it will start happening.
I'm not saying that it WILL happen, but I think it is definitely doable. With a framework like Rails your schema is already available to the program. If we just had one more generator (or more likely a gem for each supported microformat) then you could get semantic data in your app for almost free.
The canonical semantic web idea is that you build ontologies and search them. Now you have a new problem. How do you know which metadata is trustworthy? You'd be a fool to think people aren't going to attempt to game the system. If I search for "all articles about Lucy Liu", how is it that your semantic web search engine filters articles that are really about Lucy Liu from those that are merely marked up to make them appear so? You've just substituted a problem that requires as much intelligence as adding the metadata in the first place. Hell, what am I saying? Trust is a far harder problem. Even Google haven't cracked that one yet.
Yahoo is already parsing microformats out of it's search results, so if two sites are otherwise equal in content and my site has microformat information about the data I'm going to get a better relevancy ranking from Yahoo than you are, which translates to more hits and more money. More data beats better algorithms, I've seen that on this site about a dozen times in the last few weeks but when the 'more data' is overhyped like the Semantic Web everyone decides that it's totally pointless.
Your other point, that 'people will game it' is an amazingly bad reason to not do something. Think if Google had looked at PageRank and said: "yeah that's cool but all people have to do is make a link farm and they can game the system, making a new search engine is pointless."
With the level of intelligence and Hackertude that is available on this site I'm pretty astounded that there are so much vocal opposition to the Semantic Web. You're not going to beat Google in standard search but something like this could give a startup a leg-up in the market place. Maybe we should start looking at ways to answer the questions instead of just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that it won't work.
You're missing the advantage for the business people. It isn't just going to be the standardists that will care. As web developers, it's our job to explain the technology, why it matters, and more importantly, how they can benefit from it. "Get ahead of your competition by using semantic information, start future-proofing your web site."
I recently built a website for a client, filled with microformats. Advantage? I cut down on development time because I could re-use CSS from previous jobs, pretty much just copy-and-paste. I used hCards to markup people's contact info, and as a result I could create a simple link to Technorati's hCard conversion service. It means I'm maintaining one copy of the data (instead of creating an XML format too), and I can add extra functionality with no extra effort. Google now use microformats to add location addresses to it's search results. For a small-to-medium business, this is great!
Also, Standardists will typically keep things semantic anyway, so you're not really asking them to change their methods, just giving them a nice easy format to markup their format.
Businesses will adopt the technology, especially if us web developers explain to them the advantages. Plus, they get to use a whole bunch of nifty buzzwords at the next big meeting.
1) Who says there will be a "next version of the web"
2) Who says it will be "about" anything? How can a decentralized communications network be "about" something? What planet are you from?
3) See jamess's comment
As for microformats, it's mainly been embraced by navel-gazing bloggers who don't write much code if at all.
2) He was obviously talking about the direction of the technology, not implying that "everything" as it is now is going to become semantic. I think that was pretty clear.
3) Same line here. "Standards" are never going to fully be implemented, it doesn't mean that they mean nothing. Semantic web is just one step up. Most standards-based websites are designed semantically anyway, plus from a back-end perspective, REST is on the rise.
Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Technorati are using microformats already. They're all pushing the technology, they have plans as to how they want to use them. It's up to the developers to come up with solutions as to how to make them easier for the general public to use.
2) What direction?
3) I code for a living and it's news to me that Yahoo et al. use microformats in some capacity. The point is that the marketing isn't there.
2) That which the bigger companies are pushing, which ultimately relates to a not insubstantial section of the web to follow suit.
3) You're absolutely right that microformats haven't been marketed yet. If it's news to you, have an exploration around the microformats wiki. You'd be surprised who's doing what.
If you're interested in some examples of the companies I mentioned:
- Yahoo uses hCalendar, hCard, hReview on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.
- Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and use geo on their photos with geo tagged photos.
- Google use microformats to enhance their search results. I believe that XFN in particular plays a part in determining link relevance and they certainly use rel-nofollow. Across various Google products you will find hCards, XFN, rel-license and so on.
- Apple's .Mac webmail supports hCard.
- Microsoft are supposedly doing some big things with IE8 and microformats. They already use hCalendar in their WindowsLiveWriter.
- Technorati started a lot of the microformats. Basically no part of their site isn't covered with examples of them. They have a variety of services that you can use to do clever things with the microformats you use (such as their hCard to vCard converter - add a link to your page which when clicked parses the hCard and turns it into a vCard for easy addition to your address book).
Aside from these, you can add Twitter, Digg, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Facebook, Last.fm, Moveable Type, Pownce and Wordpress to the list of microformat users.
Take your time, what's the rush?
Until that day, or the day Google dies, there's not much point.
That said, wouldn't it be in Google's best interest to keep microformats at bay? Natural language processing + strong AI is how Google stays on top, no?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
Most of the arguments for using microformats are forgetting that many smart people have already, more or less, solved the content description issue. Thats what the X in XHTML is. By specifying that XHTML is valid XML, you can abide by all the rules for XML... mainly the extensible portion. You can add custom attributes to any tag you feel. There are DTDs, XSD, RelaxNG, Schemetron, etc; DTDs and XSD seem to have won the battle over document definitions. The only arguments against custom XHTML attributes are becoming more and more irrelevant. Arguments based on browser support for custom XSD or DTD documents are already irrelevant because most browsers have, or will, add support for them as a requirement to support novel things like XSLT. Arguments that DTDs and Schemas are two difficult are not really arguments. They are difficult for a reason, semantic definition is difficult. Many of the problems with microformats, i.e. namespace collisions, have been "solved" in the various XML standards. There are already many, many tools for parsing and using XML including namespaces, XIncludes, XSD, DTD, XSLT, etc... However, the tools to make microformats actually usable and useful, do not exist. Other arguments about custom attributes not being XHTML Strict valid are also irrelevant. Adding custom attributes by definition shouldn't be strict valid. Strict validity is checked against the xhtml1-strict.dtd DTD. Not being XHTML strict valid isn't a bad thing as long as the document is still valid XML and a schema/DTD document exists to prove it. This is, in my opinion, a major flaw in microformats. There is no source of validity. Anyone can use any thing for microformat descriptions. There is no perception of validity what so ever.
Most of the arguments for microformats, especially coming from the community tend towards ignorance of details. When you don't fully understand the details of the XML roots of XHTML, you tend to try and hack it or reinvent the wheel. Really diving into XML technology beyond XHTML sheds insight and vision on where the XML trend is moving, why, and where XHTML can follow along.
The only questionably valid arguments are for the current landscape not fully supporting XHTML+XML. However, as I have stated, that is quickly becoming a non-issue. You can also argue that XML wasn't meant to be the solution to the semantic web... but I ask, why isn't it? Tell me why a language designed to mark-up any data cannot describe the semantics of that data?