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The semantic web is now widely adopted

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Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user. Price which needs to be paid by each user separately instead of using one already generated. LLMs are much better when the user adapts the categories to their needs or crunches the text to pull only the info relevant to them. Communicating those categories and the…

> Prompt injection is highly relevant because you end up achieving the same as the publisher choosing the metadata, but on a much higher price for the user. How does price affect the relevance of prompt injection? That doesn't make sense. > nitch Niche. Pronounced neesh.

My question is: how price does not matter? If you are given the choice to pay either a dollar or a million dollars for the same good from an untrustworthy merchant, why would you pay the million? And the difference between parsing a json and sending a few megabytes of a webpage to chatgpt is the same if not bigger. For a dishonest seo engineer it does not matter if they will post boasting metadata or a prompt convincing chatgpt in the same. The difference is for the user.

I don't mind the delusions of most people, but the idea that llms will deal with spam if you throw a million times more electricity against it is what makes the planet burning.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#132

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got…

Say what you want, but Macromedia Dreamweaver came pretty close to being "that killer app". Microsoft attempted the same with Frontpage, but abandoned it pretty quickly as they always do.

I think that Web Browsers need to change what they are. They need to be able to understand content, correlate it, and distribute it. If a Browser sees itself not as a consuming app, but as a _contributing_ and _seeding_ app, it could influence the semantic web pretty quickly, and make it much more awesome.

Beaker Browser came pretty close to that idea (but it was abandoned, too).

Humans won't give a damn about hand-written semantic code, so you need to make the tools better that produce that code.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#133
post #114

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got…

Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm . They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations tow…

Thanks for sharing that Doctorow post, I had not seen that before. While the specific examples are of course dated (hello altavista and Napster), it still rings mostly true.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#134
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet LLMS fail to make these simple but sometimes meaningful differentiation. See for example this case in which a court reporter is described as being all the things he reported about by Copilot: a child molester, a psychatric escapee, a widow cheat. Presumably because his name was in a lot of articles about said things and LLMS simply associate his name with the crimes without making the connection that he could in…

Humans do something very similar, fwiw. It's called spontaneous trait association: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

> fwiw

What do you think this sort of observation is worth?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#135
post #126

I don't see how one can have any hope in a Semantic Web ever succeeding when we haven't even managed to get HTML tags for extremely common Internet things: pricetags, comments, units, avatars, usernames, advertisement and so on. Even things like pagination are generally just a bunch of links, not any kind of semantic thing holding multiple documents together ( exists, but I haven't seen browsers doing anything with i…

I don't think we necessarily need new tags: they narrow down the list of possible into an immutable set and require changing the structure of your already existing content. What exists instead are microformats ( http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2 ), a bunch of classes you sprinkle in your current HTML to "augment" it.

I include microformats on blog sites, but at scale the challenge with microformats is that most existing tooling doesn't consider class names at all for semantics.

Browsers, for example, completely ignore classes when building the accessibility tree for a web page. Only the HTML structure and a handful of CSS properties have an impact on accessibility.

Class names were always meant as an ease of use feature for styling, overloading them with semantic meaning could break a number of sites built over the last few decades.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#136

> If Web 3.0 is already here, where is it, then? Mostly, it's hidden in the markup. I feel like this is so obvious to point out that I must be missing something, but the whole article goes to heroic lengths to avoid... HTML. Is it because HTML is difficult and scary? Why invent a custom JSON format and a custom JSON-to-HTML compiler toolchain than just write HTML? The semantics aren't hidden in the markup. The semant…

[dead]

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#137

Well worth, for whom? as a blogger, these things are 99% for the companies making profit by scraping my content, maybe 1% of the users will need them. Or am I wrong?

This has been my hang up as well. Providing metadata seems extremely useful and powerful, but coming into web development in the mid 10s rather than mid 00s made it more clear that the metadata would largely just help a handful of massive corporations.

I will still include JSON-LD when it make financial sense for a site. In practice that usually just means business metadata for search results and product data for any ecommerce pages.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#138
post #9

> Before JSON-LD there was a nest of other, more XMLy, standards emitted by the various web steering groups. These actually have very, very deep support in many places (for example in library and archival systems) but on the open web they are not a goer. If archival systems and library's are using XML, wouldn't it be preferable to follow their lead and whatever standards they are using? Since they are the ones who ar…

> If nothing else, you can add a processing instruction to the document they use to convert it to HTML.

Like XSLT?

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#139

> If Web 3.0 is already here, where is it, then? Mostly, it's hidden in the markup. I feel like this is so obvious to point out that I must be missing something, but the whole article goes to heroic lengths to avoid... HTML. Is it because HTML is difficult and scary? Why invent a custom JSON format and a custom JSON-to-HTML compiler toolchain than just write HTML? The semantics aren't hidden in the markup. The semant…

I think that’s what we’re doing today, and it’s a phenomenal mess.

The typical HTML page these days is horrifically bloated, and whilst it’s machine parsable, it’s often complicated to actually understand what’s what. It’s random nested divs and unified everything. All the way down.

But I do wonder if adding context to existing HTML might be better than a whole other JSON blob that’ll get out of sync fast.

Re: The semantic web is now widely adopted

#140

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got…

There's another element, trusting the data.

Often that may require some web scale data, like Pagerank but also any other authority/trust metric where you can say "this data is probably quality data".

A rather basic example, published/last modified dates. It's well known in SEO circles at least in the recent past that changing them is useful to rank in Google, because Google prefers fresh content. Unless you're Google or have a less than trivial way of measuring page changes, the data may be less than trustworthy.

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