Hacker News Reader

Comment by waxjar | Hacker News Reader

The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags. Most importantly, no tables for layout and using semantic names for CSS classes rather than names like "blue". This has completely failed, imo. Tables are no longer constructed with <table>, <tr> and <td> but with a combination of <div> and <span> tags with classes that are not semantic at all :(

Edit: Not sure why this got downvoted, just trying to illustrate what I thought the term meant.

View on HN

> The semantic web as I understood it was just using the right HTML tags.

Using semantic HTML (rather than presentational HMTL) for content is somewhat related to the Semantic Web, but not equivalent to it -- the Semantic Web is/was about open, composable ways of extracting and processing meaning from content on the web. HTML itself (even HTML5 or the current state of the HTML Living Standard) -- even when used in a cleanly semantic way -- isn't expressive enough to do much with that without building additional ontological structure on top of that, hence things like RDF and Microformats.

That sense of the term was actually co-opted from what people are talking about in this discussion, i.e., rdf, microdata, etc. They are related though, as using the correct HTML tags was meant to be a first step into adding a layer of meaning to web content that wasn't there before. But "the semantic web" includes a whole, whole lot more than just semantic markup. Hope that clarifies a bit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com