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JSON-LD explained for personal websites

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Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#81

Post by tannhaeuser »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #77
lolive wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept will re-emerge somehow. Webpages are 99.99% of the time the formatting of a data structure for humans. LLM can barely infer that data structure from the webpage and connect it with other data structure of other pages. [truth is that the LLM algorithm does not do that AT ALL internally, but from our user experience it really looks like it does]. But when webpages die and data is accessed only by machine2ma…

I agree that something like it will re-emerge. But I also think the semantic web has always been misunderstood and misapplied even by its proponents. In my view, semantic web technologies should have been used to make databases interoperable, not to turn the hypertext web into an incredibly incomplete distributed database without any data quality process.

Are you referring to ActivityPub traffic (Mastodon, etc.)? Yes they're nominally using JSON-LD, but actually most devs seem to not have understood that ActivityStreams is just a projection of RDF triples into JSON. Instead they go with the part they did unterstand (because JSON is better than markup right?), and end up tunneling markdown or HTML through JSON strings and uneccessarily hardcoding their payloads in ORM layers in dynamic languages. If I were mean, I'd compare the situation to insects incapable of comprehending a 3D universe, clinging to syntactic surfaces that seem familiar.

But what can you do? At this point, keeping federated alternatives, protocol-first designs, and multiple interworking implementations is more important than purity; it might well be the last successful initiative of its kind.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#82

Post by tannhaeuser »

klodolph wrote: post #16

I would encourage people who have the pragmatic bent to read about JSON-LD from the Google documentation for web sites; https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).…

Fedi review sites (neodb/reviewdb, bookwyrm) make use of JSON-LD in a big way. Their entire data federation is based on ActivityStreams and JSON-LD, and so is the review data they get authors to share on their federation along with legacy sites such as goodreads. They're also considerate of proper RDF mappings (context namespace, RDF-friendly encoding of collections, etc.).

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#83

Post by lolive »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #77
lolive wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept will re-emerge somehow. Webpages are 99.99% of the time the formatting of a data structure for humans. LLM can barely infer that data structure from the webpage and connect it with other data structure of other pages. [truth is that the LLM algorithm does not do that AT ALL internally, but from our user experience it really looks like it does]. But when webpages die and data is accessed only by machine2ma…

I agree that something like it will re-emerge. But I also think the semantic web has always been misunderstood and misapplied even by its proponents. In my view, semantic web technologies should have been used to make databases interoperable, not to turn the hypertext web into an incredibly incomplete distributed database without any data quality process.

I work with Palantir Foundry stack, and I awfully think that this is the best implementation of semantic web principles I could ever imagine.

And the current trend is really to connect the AI layer of Foundry with the ontology layer.

Note: after rereading your comment, I must admit that Foundry enforces data co-locality and model co-locality (==a unified centrally managed ontology). Which are NOT what the semantic web wanted.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#84

Post by fauigerzigerk »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #81
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that something like it will re-emerge. But I also think the semantic web has always been misunderstood and misapplied even by its proponents. In my view, semantic web technologies should have been used to make databases interoperable, not to turn the hypertext web into an incredibly incomplete distributed database without any data quality process.

Are you referring to ActivityPub traffic (Mastodon, etc.)? Yes they're nominally using JSON-LD, but actually most devs seem to not have understood that ActivityStreams is just a projection of RDF triples into JSON. Instead they go with the part they did unterstand (because JSON is better than markup right?), and end up tunneling markdown or HTML through JSON strings and uneccessarily hardcoding their payloads in ORM…

>Are you referring to ActivityPub traffic (Mastodon, etc.)?

No, I wasn't even aware that they use anything RDF related.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#86

Post by rhdunn »

klodolph wrote: post #11
panzi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there is https://schema.org/ It's the item* attributes, e.g.: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... Also Dublin Core in tags. Why do they keep adding conflicting meta data formats to HTML!?!

I think if you are using Dublin Core, it’s because you’re a library. Maybe I am off the mark, but that is the sense I get from this—not all these standards should be used for all pages on the web. I think you should just think about what metadata you actually care about, and the main metadata I care about (choose your own list) is authorship, publish date, last update, subject keywords, thumbnail (OpenGraph 1200x630)…

Dublin Core is effectively similar/related to schema.org's CreativeWork. If you have a creative work (audiobook, short story, news article, etc.) then Dublin Core is applicable, in addition to the corresponding CreativeWork subtype.

And yes, you should use whatever metadata is applicable to your site and test it against the search engines/etc. you want to support to make sure that they are reading the metadata correctly.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#87

Post by account42 »

mring33621 wrote: post #85

i understand the desire, but this is torture, unless you can get a machine to generate it for you.

I'm not even sure what reason you'd have for adding this to a personal website in $current_year. Making things easier for automated data extractors isn't really what I'd consider a priority.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#88

Post by dieselgate »

bryanhogan wrote: post #42

Some additional information, what you actually want to implement for every website is Structured Data, using the Schema.org vocabulary. JSON-LD is one of the ways to do this. There's also RDFa and Microdata. I used this article and can recommend it when I first learned about it: https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-started-using-schema/ You can try exploring what data to add with this tool: https://technicalseo.com/tools/s…

I've worked on professional SEO teams for a large stock photography org and this needs to be higher. JSON-LD is just the most attainable technical "bolt-on" implementation of structured data from both a server and client-side rendered web architecture.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#89

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

wongarsu wrote: post #76
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like other commenters have said, this is 25 years too late, and it's made even more irrelevant by modern tech. "The Semantic Web" and all related ideas were always a failure. The metadata quickly got out of date, was never correct in the first place, was only ever implemented on a teeny minority of sites, and always suffered from bad actors where the metadata didn't match the content. Heck, even before LLMs I'd argue…

JSON-LD is 12 years old. Just four years after Facebook introduced Open Graph to make their links prettier. Maybe an appeal to implement it today is 25 years too late. But there were plenty of appeals 10 years ago, or to implement open graph 15 years ago

> Just four years after Facebook introduced Open Graph to make their links prettier.

One point to highlight about this. Open Graph succeeded more than any other web metadata proposal solely because there was obvious, immediate payoff for the website owner. That's literally the only way stuff like this ever succeeds, and then direct, clear payoff line never (and still doesn't) exist with JSON-LD.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#90

Post by trollbridge »

elevation wrote: post #75
trollbridge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. Our own business now comes up with this in a Google search: an $STATE-based IT firm that specializes in building practical AI workflows and information management solutions for midwestern businesses. Operating with an agile, fixed-fee engagement model, the company focuses on avoiding enterprise bloat while delivering concrete results. I did not know we were now offering "practical AI workflows". It then m…

> mixes in the name of a competitor If I were your competitor and saw that your listing includes my business name but your contact info, you might be getting a letter from my lawyer. Have you let Google know they're putting you at legal risk?

Your lawyer can send all the letters they want; I have zero control over information or misinformation in Google's AI mode.
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