One of the reasons given for "upgrading" the web via things like HTML4 is that it will enable us to work towards a "semantic web".
Hogwash. Anyone spouting this crap hasn't really read the HTML4 DTD.
As evidenced by the progress of the W3C , and the spate of intelligent people resigning from the XML standards process, most of what's going on is mental masturbation by academics who love complexity for its own sake, and who are ignoring the lessons that should have been learned from SGML and DSSL.
Witness the <cite> element. While the HTML4 strict DTD does give it the same title attribute that all %phrase elements have, why isn't there an attribute that would let us tell exactly what document we're citing? Some suggestion for how to stuff an ISBN or ISSN, and revision and page numbers in there.
The <blockquote> and too little supported <q> elements at least have the cite attribute (which is supposed to be a URI), why haven't they introduced some elements with no default behavior to do some of the semantic tags that we so horrendously need, like <date> tags and the like?
An <person> tag that would let me somehow identify in the attributes as much as I know about the name I'm referencing, so that others can search my documents for references to people that I call by their first name?
Rather the W3C is quickly making itself irrelevant as people develop ad-hoc solutions to the real problems that the W3C is not addressing while it kowtows to the advertisers screaming for pixel positioning. At least most of these are happening in XML so that they're easy to format, but few of them are actually happening as markup languages, most of them are separate from, and not integrated into, the documents that we're actually reading.
So instead we find ourselves having to intrepret the markup that's evolved through written language. When Jorn Barger predicted this back in July of 1999 , all the XML proponents screamed, but their inaction has made such workarounds our only option, and trying to make machines understand English seems to be what we're left with.
Wednesday, March 14th, 2001 danlyke@flutterby.com