Another Bureaucratic Failure

We can all enjoy a bit schadenfreude at Microsoft's expense. But it's sad to see a more noble organisation, the W3C, brought down too.

Still, the rule is simple : workings programs trump abstract "standards" any day. And the realpolitik is that if you have programs to execute something, you (may) have the (makings of) a de facto standard. If you don't, you don't have any kind of standard at all.

Ultimately the blog post gets it right. We're better off with a W3C that retrospectively "officialises" existing de facto standards that the browser makers are innovating, rather than tries to think up standards itself. 

He he!

I am so not with the zeitgeist ... :-)

Yahoo goes SemWeb.

OK ... show me.

Maybe in 6 months I'll have to eat my words, come back and tell me then if this has reinvented the web or anything ...

Twine apparently "disappoints".

Frankly, I'll be impressed if it does anything useful at all. (That couldn't be done just as well by the SynWeb). The SemWeb is such a dumb idea in the first place, it's kind of sad to see so many smart people pour so much into it. And kind of hilarious that allegedly clever journalist act all surprised : "hey! but it was so hyped! what a shock to find it's useless"

Interesting analysis of the fragility of SemWeb meta-data. Calls for explicit human viewable and "auditable" meta-data.

Of course, it's hilarious that the SemWeb people haven't yet managed to solve the problem of how to "address" things with URIs. :-) After all, people have been addressing things successfully with URLs for years.

What is apparently difficult is being clear exactly *what* is being addressed. Because SemWeb promises we can be unambiguous about that, but then seems to have problem distinguishing whether we're talking about the "sense" or the "reference".

In contrast URLs have no problems refering because we're not too fussy about what they refer to.

Could there be some kind of "uncertainty principle" here? One which says you can know "what" a thing is or "where" it is, but not both at the same time?

Nick Carr makes me curious about Twine.

I'm keeping an open mind on the new round of hoopla over "semantic" applications.

I'm a known SemWeb sceptic and I still don't believe in the premise - which I take to be that we should define ontologies (or the semantics of URIs) up-front, independent of applications, and then applications will magically communicate together later because they'll all understand what each other are talking about.

But it may be that the "SemWeb" people have changed their tune and these new players are really only talking about a SynWeb with more meta-data and more smart programs guessing what it means.

Of course, I'm a bit of a pedant and I understand subtle distinctions that maybe the average tech. journalist doesn't. And personally I'm going to find it fucking annoying if we do get a SynWeb and then all the SemWeb people go round claiming that they were right, and this is what they meant all along. But I rather fear that that's exactly what is going to happen, and I'll just have to suck it up and adopt their mendatious terminology in order to be able to communicate at all.

Wittgenstein, bah! :-(