The importance of semantics
Sunday, January 1, 2006Working with SpringCMS I've become a meaningful XHTML convert. The semantic web, microformats, WYSIWYM; it's all too valuable to ignore. What is clear to me now is that each post is like a little database of information. I write paragraphs of text that contain links and quotes and so on. But, with a little effort, it can be made so much more useful.
I've experimented with blockquotes on this site and because I've made the effort to formalise a markup syntax I can now use blockquotes in many different ways. Quotes no longer dissappear within the block of text for a blog entry; I can extract them, manipulate them, aggregate them and, if I feel so inclined, I can change the use of it anytime in the future without having to edit the blog entries.
This is the idea behind the Semantic Web as described by Tim Berners-Lee. I author the quotations in a blog entry in such a way that they are readable by both humans and machine processes; In this case the software of my CMS . Making it usable by software does not in any way make it less usable by humans. It's like having your cake and eating it too!
Ayesha Kaljuvee has the best description of the future benefits of this approach in her article " XML, Ontologies, and the Semantic Web".
Let's consider an example illustrating the advantages of having semantics that add meaning to information on the Web. Say you live in New York and decide to attend a conference in London. You would have to go to many airline Web sites and look at all flights leaving from New York to London. Then, you would go to various hotel Web sites and look for a hotel near your conference location that has a room available. That's a fair bit of searching. Luckily, you can search for the information on the Web, and in most cases you can pay for everything on the Web.
Now imagine another scenario: you're driving down 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Your secretary calls you on your cell phone and says that you've been invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference in Europe on May 5, 2003. You think that's great, and you begin to make plans for your trip. You flip open your Palm Pilot, which is connected to the Web, and you type in some commands: book flight and return from New York to London, May 5-11; book room in hotel near the conference location, Hilton London Metropole, in London.
Your Palm Pilot has a software program or software agent that understands your commands; it processes the semantics of your command intelligently. Your agent buys your ticket and books a room in a hotel. As you drive into your garage, your Palm Pilot beeps and asks you to confirm the information. You park your car, confirm the bookings, and then go inside. This is just one example of how easy life gets when the Web is an intelligent partner in your universe.
–XML, Ontologies, and the Semantic Web
So many CMS and other authoring tools still view XHTML as a means to a visual end. They are stuck in the "Subject, Entry Body and Extended Body" mindset. That the body text of you blog entry is just one solid, undividable blob of text to fill a slot in a template. I think it's the wrong approach; the visual end product is entirely arbitrary. Now that might offend the visual design oriented souls out there but it's true. While I quite understand that visual design is communication, on the web you can take it or leave it. What remains is the text and markup.
One problem with the uptake of the meaningful XHTML philosophy is the lack of tools to generate the XHTML and to make use of it. If you decide to improve your markup to make it more meaningful you'll find yourself doing a lot of manual markup and it's a hell of a lot of work just to achieve a few simple things. The tools just don't exist.
I have discovered the Structured Blogging initiative and so the need for tools is obvious. There's a long way to go especially since CMS creators are still infatuated with WYSIWYG. As for me, it's so obviously a good thing, and because I can make good use of it with SpringCMS, I'm going to keep looking for more things I can do with my markup.
Some good reading:
- Towards structured blogging
- Structured Blogging is a thing you do -- not a format
- Technorati tag 'StricturedBlogging'
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