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Comment by jamess | Hacker News Reader

Well, imagine you're right. What then? Once you have all the magical, microformatted metadata what is it exactly you do with it?

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.

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I think all of you have missed an important point. Sure, purists like me use microformats all the time, and you're right when you say it's going to take more than that.

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.

Careful with reusing stuff from previous jobs unless you carefully negotiated to make sure you retain ownership over what you create.

To me, semantic markup is about making reusable patterns of information that relate to the content. Can I harness that to my advantage in CSS? Of course. It's really no different than saying "I'm going to make every sidebar I ever make have a class called 'aside'." Is technique grounds for issues over ownership?

Technique is probably not an issue but "copying and pasting" work you've done for another client is likely problematic. Well, hopefully your clients aren't the kind that get litigious over these things but I still wouldn't go around telling everyone that I'm reusing work from previous jobs.

So now that I've answered the 'How do you do it question' I have to also explain what would be done with it? Alright that's fine.

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.

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