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#!/your/path/to/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

Start here:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScri pt_1.5_Guide

(Yes, those are the Netscape docs from 10 years ago. No one read them then, either.)

If you're brave, I also recommend the ECMA specs:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-262.htm

All the Web APIs you need to go with that can be found at the source:

http://www.w3.org/

I just read the basics of RDF and I can see that this could be a really really bad idea. If RDF is intended as an internal data representation for a search engine company to use then this is great. The search engine company or your own company's search engine staff can police and audit your RDF data. However, if I'm reading this right RDF is *supposed* to be populated by *volunteered* data. As such you're going to suffer not just the Wikipedia effect but all the problems seen in MetaData from an internet generation ago.

You'll see RDF associations linking the president to a crass picture of a donkey or a goat of some kind. You'll see companies set up to deliberately poison RDF data with false links designed to drive traffic to a site... you'll see sock-puppets and all kinds of other attacks.

This whole effort reminds me of the "this is spam" bit that was proposed to stop spam. You can't expect spammers to say to themselves, "wait, I better flip the this-is-spam but to true before I send this" you also can't expect people to not abuse the RDF system in similar ways.

Don't expect that if you RDF search for Stephen King that everything that comes up was actually posted by him. Imagine the pages that would get attributed to the president or Mr. T as a prank... the information would only be useful if you could verify the document as legitimate first.

The "is part of" feature is the most likely target of abuse I think. I could say that everything I wrote is part of the New York Times or as part of some official document that gets searched for often. The result would be erroneous hits in RDF search and artificial authority for my crack pot theories.

Second, the problem with "the semantic web" if you're relying on people providing the metadata themselves, is the reliability (trustworthiness?) of the person creating the metadata.

One of misconceptions about the Semantic Web - that it's only about metadata when in fact it's about a Web of Data, e.g., currently locked in in databases, blog engines or social software sites. (related: SemWeb FAQ entry on "Does the Semantic Web require me to manually markup all the existing web-pages ... ?")

A very, very simple example - if you enable creation of RDF data creation in a WordPress weblog (via a WordPress SIOC plugin), all this information is generated automatically, from the data already inside a database. What you get is every blog post, etc. in a machine-readable form (RDF), ready for query and reuse.

Of course, that is very "light" semantics - expressing what the blog engine knows. As for data / structured content created by people directly - there's always risk for someone writing lies. Then there's a need for the concept of trust (can we trust the source?) and some ranking mechanism.

RDF is just a way to express knowledge. In answer to "any difference between this new RDF and ..." you may take a look at the W3C Semantic Web FAQ (published very recently).

Now, like you said what we find depends on what we feed into search engines and on the engines themselves. To this regard it's work for better search engines and ranking algorithms, and the work described here is an important step in this path. There's a link to a technical report and more details posted (by a developer) in another Slashdot comment.

Now all we need to do is get everyone to start using RDF.... wait.. you dont even know what that is??

Yep, but the spec saying "3D would be cool" is a long way off actually doing any work on it - there was a bit of discussion on the mailing list some years ago, but (as far as I'm aware) nothing else has been done within the WHATWG since then. (And all the work is done in the open, so it would be obvious if they had done any.)

In any case, Microsoft is staying out of the WHATWG because of the lack of a patent policy, but they're involved in the HTML WG and seem to be interested in pursuing the HTML5 work now. I expect the 3D canvas work would be done in the WHATWG instead (as it seems much more productive than the HTML WG) and so Microsoft wouldn't be able to get involved even if they cared; but I expect that the 2D canvas will end up in the W3C spec, which will hopefully give Microsoft enough reason (and enough assurances about avoiding patent lawsuits) to implement it at some point in the future. But that'll probably be years in the best case, and 3D seems further out... In the meantime, I'll just keep making sites that work in everything except IE :-)

Now...I'm not REALLY familiar with entire span of legacy protocols such as gopher, but what I say is the case for 99% of what's online at the moment. Also, I am not sure this is truly succinct but you can decide that... The real answer to your question can be found in the following W3C document: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ The summary of this article is that the world-wide-web is an information system comprised of many many unique names (URIs) and the things at the end of each URI. Often its text in the form of HTML. Well, as the internet IS for porn sometimes it's bytes at the end in the form of JPGs and PNGs and GIFs. Sometimes it's bytes of Flash, or PDF-bytes. Sometimes it is software, which could take the form of an executable (.exe), a VOIP conversation, or an HTML-based web application. Sometimes you can't see what's on the other side. It varies widely, but there is always an URL. This system of names sits atop a network of hardware that simliarly is made up of many unique names (IP addressed). This is the "bunch of telephones" part of it. This is something I personally know less about, but I will say this...the glue that binds these URLs to the hardware with its IP addresses is the domain-name system. This is one of those questions where the answer is like an onion...it is many layered and you can keep peeling and peeling and peeling layers away. Some are thin, some are thick. I think that the two layers I've outlined...the URI system and the computers with their phone lines are the real important layers.

I hate to break it to you, troll, but "M$" is getting nailed by the very system you claim they enjoy. Ever heard of Eolas? I'd really appreciate it if you showed us a single instance of Microsoft (oh, "M$") using a patent offensively. That does not include FAT32, which is about as common a licensing scheme as it comes in the hardware world.

Microsoft plays the game the same way IBM and everyone else does to protect themselves from the patent trolls. The system is broken. Constantly harping on why "M$ is teh bad" like Stallman is not going to help much.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text

Welcome to the Internet! Click here!

-Peter

System and method for generating web sites in an arbitrary object framework

Abstract

A system and method for generating computer applications in an arbitrary object framework. The method separates content, form, and function of the computer application so that each may be accessed or modified separately. The method includes creating arbitrary objects, managing the arbitrary objects throughout their life cycle in an object library, and deploying the arbitrary objects in a design framework for use in complex computer applications.

This patent is from Oct 01 1999. XML was introduced in 1996, OOP has been around since 1965, I've had re-usuable code objects in TurboPascal, Basic, C++... yeah pretty much every decent language released in the last 15 years. So WTF?? How can one company say they own USING pre-existing technologies?

... oh yeah, it's for the interwebs! Funny that their patent is the exact time of the dot-com bubble. This smacks of "Hey, lets take something we already have and patent it for use on the net... we can make bank!".

I thought any patent based on prior art was invalid, regardless of where the "new" one is implemented, am I wrong?

No. Like it or not, the standards are what the W3C produces - and while it might surprise you, Microsoft is actually a member of the W3C as well.

Your analogy about English in the USA is flawed as well, since English is the standard language in the USA by virtue of being used by *many different* people. A better analogy would be a group of people, one of which has a very loud voice; you might say he matters more because he contributes more to the total volume of the group than all the others combined, but that doesn't automatically make whatever language *he* speaks the standard. And if you now imagine that these people (including the very loud guy) actually all got together to decide on a common language and that while everyone else started using it, this guy continues to ignore it and uses his own dialect instead... then I'm sure you can see why the current situation is so ridiculous and why IE and Microsoft are in the wrong here.

And if I used JavaScript, would also have a message come up (hidden if JavaScript was used).

Wow, a copy of an OS News flame post :) (same team of astroturfers ?)

Seriously, there is none so deaf as he who will not hear.

What about all these fine standards made available by the W3C ? SMIL maybe ?

Wait, nobody uses it because MSIE, used by 80% of people, doesn't implement it. Who's at fault ?
From the Wikipedia, implementation have been made mainly for handheld and mobile devices... where MSIE doesn't rule.

Wow, a copy of an OS News flame post :) (same team of astroturfers ?)

Seriously, there is none so deaf as he who will not hear.

What about all these fine standards made available by the W3C ? SMIL maybe ?

Wait, nobody uses it because MSIE, used by 80% of people, doesn't implement it. Who's at fault ?
From the Wikipedia, implementation have been made mainly for handheld and mobile devices... where MSIE doesn't rule.

I care because for the most part, people do not use IE/Windows out of choice, they use it by default, even when there are better alternatives available.

I care because enough people do this that IE/Windows become a defacto standard. Before Firefox started gaining ground, many websites were coded to IE, not to standards -- and IE broke the standards. This affected me directly, because when I was using Mozilla (and early Phoenix builds, which was later renamed to Firefox), I would often run into websites designed only for IE, which would not work properly on other browsers, even when they followed the standards, assuming they let me in the door in the first place.

There are still entirely too many websites, even non-ActiveX ones, which will use browser detection and block you at the door if you're not using IE.

So, if you use IE, you're directly responsible for parts of the Web sucking for Firefox users, and that is one reason I look down on you.

Even now, websites designed for standards, which work flawlessly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and many other browsers, continue to fail in IE, because IE does not support the standards properly. But since so many use IE, the standard user response is, "This website is broken." The standard way to deal with this is to spend several times as long developing your website (or web app) in order to ensure that it also works on IE.

Go talk to any serious web developer about the problems of supporting IE. When they tell you, understand that they are not exaggerating at all. It really is at least that bad. And that's just with existing standards; IE has been the most resistant when it comes to supporting actual new standards. (Adding their own does not count; Microsoft does not (or should not) dictate Web standards, that's what the w3c is for.

(And if they are using a toolkit, like Dojo or Google Web Toolkit, that just means the toolkit is doing the work for them. It also means that a very large portion of that toolkit had to be written to fix the problems Microsoft introduces with IE.)

Windows is another problem for another rant. But let me just give you one: Anti-virus software would not have to exist, were it not for Windows. Also, hardware manufacturers tend to write their drivers for Windows only, meaning Windows gets the credit for working on just about any hardware, without having to do any of the work. It also means that they tend to not release specifications, meaning Linux has to reverse-engineer these things.

So, you, as a Windows user, are directly contributing to my problems -- things like my wireless card not working, and the difficulty of finding a wireless card known to work with Linux.

That is why we look down on you. You are making the computing world a hell for anyone who doesn't make the same choices you do (Windows/IE). Microsoft may have made Windows/IE hell to work with, but you, without even realizing it, are making it more and more difficult to choose anything else.

Since W3C's privacy policy standard (P3P) is driven by Double Click among others I expect very little support for end users from that direction, especially since it has been acquired by Google.

Is there anyone who can support or reject my idea from a legal perspective? Technically you could use several of the plug-ins mentioned above to inject the statement. A website with sample statements would help as well.

Blink is already supported by the W3C in CSS:

text-decoration: blink;

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#lining-str iking-props

Does not CSS3--a current standard with which nobody yet complies--provide means for columnar layouts?

Actually, CSS 2 does. But Internet Explorer doesn't implement that bit of CSS 2, despite the spec turning nine years old this year.

the xmlhttprequest object is not implemented as a standard and there is no standard proposed for it.

Yes there is.

Instead we have a proposed standard for similar functionality by the W3C (DOM level 3 "load and save")

Actually, that became a Recommendation just over three years ago. There's nothing "proposed" about it.

This "real" standard (DOM3LS) thus far is only supported in Opera IIRC, and the Mozilla team really pushes back when asked to work on such support.

I remember trying out DOM3LS a couple of years ago, and Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror all supported the draft specification.

Does not CSS3--a current standard with which nobody yet complies--provide means for columnar layouts?

Actually, CSS 2 does. But Internet Explorer doesn't implement that bit of CSS 2, despite the spec turning nine years old this year.

the xmlhttprequest object is not implemented as a standard and there is no standard proposed for it.

Yes there is.

Instead we have a proposed standard for similar functionality by the W3C (DOM level 3 "load and save")

Actually, that became a Recommendation just over three years ago. There's nothing "proposed" about it.

This "real" standard (DOM3LS) thus far is only supported in Opera IIRC, and the Mozilla team really pushes back when asked to work on such support.

I remember trying out DOM3LS a couple of years ago, and Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror all supported the draft specification.

Actually, you are reinventing the wheel. That shortcut syntax is part of HTML. I don't think any browser ever implemented it though.

-1 Wrong. We are talking about HTML 3.2 here.

The biggest thing is that the W3C doesn't actually make a fully useful browser of their own...

As it happens, that multipage version is one I hacked together yesterday, using the html5lib parser and an HTML5 innerHTML-like serialiser. The original and more-official version of the spec (from which the multipage one is derived) validates as HTML 4.01 Strict - the only problem is that it's quite large and makes browsers unhappy, hence the new multipage version.

(The multipage one does conform as HTML5 - but the conformance checker and the spec are still far from stable, so that doesn't mean a lot.)

On Mon 4/9/2007 10:38 PM Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>Dear HTML Working Group,

>[three hyphen-delimited proposals; one auxilliary proposal]

I guess since much of this is already on the co-chair's agenda: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/il16 (item #2) , I would, from a procedural point of view, have preferred the question to have been called by one of the chairs. It would lend an air of formality to whatever discussion ensues.

regards, David Dailey

I thought it was because it was a pointless and unneeded reformulation of existing standards with no BC?

You're welcome to that opinion, but I think the fact that it's a work-in-progress is the relevant factor to consider when wondering why people aren't using it. Even the W3C themselves don't want anybody to use it yet. In their own words, from the top of the latest specification: "It should in no way be considered stable, and should not be normatively referenced for any purposes whatsoever."

Lynx will never support application/xhtml+xml

Lynx already supports application/xhtml+xml. According to the changelog, support was added almost three years ago.

Well, you can't blame him. He is not the only one that doesn't get it right: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .whatwg.org%2Fspecs%2Fweb-apps%2Fcurrent-work%2Fmu ltipage%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype= Inline

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years

No, the W3C have been very busy.

XHTML was last updated in 2002

No, XHTML was last updated two months ago.

no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML.

Everybody is ignoring XHTML 2.0 because it isn't finished yet. XHTML 1.1 is not an option for most developers for one reason in particular: you can't use it with Internet Explorer. Blame Microsoft.

Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items

No, both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict are available for those people who wish to use a document type that doesn't include the deprecated stuff. And even if they weren't available, nobody needs deprecated items to be removed. If you don't want them, don't use them. Just because they appear in a specification it doesn't mean you are forced to use them.

The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development.

No, they are requesting that the W3C — the organisation you've just written off as closed and useless — adopt their work as a starting point, so that it can be developed further at the W3C. They aren't asking that the W3C give it Recommendation status, they are asking the W3C to take over its development.

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years

No, the W3C have been very busy.

XHTML was last updated in 2002

No, XHTML was last updated two months ago.

no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML.

Everybody is ignoring XHTML 2.0 because it isn't finished yet. XHTML 1.1 is not an option for most developers for one reason in particular: you can't use it with Internet Explorer. Blame Microsoft.

Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items

No, both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict are available for those people who wish to use a document type that doesn't include the deprecated stuff. And even if they weren't available, nobody needs deprecated items to be removed. If you don't want them, don't use them. Just because they appear in a specification it doesn't mean you are forced to use them.

The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development.

No, they are requesting that the W3C — the organisation you've just written off as closed and useless — adopt their work as a starting point, so that it can be developed further at the W3C. They aren't asking that the W3C give it Recommendation status, they are asking the W3C to take over its development.

while AJAX programmers are still struggling to get buttons working

Performance. I've coded in DirectX, and I've coded in Java. I'll take DirectX any day.

Flow layout is stupid. No, seriously. What I mean is: flow layout is fine for reading - desktop publishing, embedded images, all that junk. But it's stupid for a window-based GUI. As a UI designer, I'll take the absolute positioning and "anchoring" models over browser-based flow layouts any day.

The goal of this optimizer is increased sales/conversion/et cetera. I'm going to hijack this topic a bit and ask: Does anyone know of any other good website optimization tests? I know, of course, of the W3C Validator and I'm familiar with a cacheability tester or two, but... I'd like to know if there are any other good ones out there. Are there any which will check for fun things like metadata and navigation tags (remember and such?) and present you with a big list of all the things you can do to go the extra mile for your site?

Hmm, my CPU usage is hovering around 1.5%. Sounds like you could use NoScript, Adblock, Adblock Filterset.G Updater, and Flashblock. If that sounds like bloat to you, you can lower your CPU usage to ~0 with Lynx, w3m, or Links. If that's still too much overhead for you, give LineMode a try.

Well, for starters, changing the mouse cursor is a part of the official W3C CSS specs...
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ui.html#propdef-cursor

In other words, *something* has to be able to load and process the mouse cursor. And if the thing that loads and processes the mouse cursor falls prey to a buffer overflow, then you've got yourself a vulnerability. Since it's the OS that handles and draws the mouse (so it's not an IE thing; FF will fall prey to this too), it's the OS that handles the mouse cursor, so a buffer overflow there means that it's the OS that gets compromised--the very same thing could happen in any other OS if there was a similar mistake. So they forgot a length check. Shit happens.

Can you make a self modifying javascript application?

I agree with keeping Firefox slim.

People say they want "just a Web browser"... but what if this *is* the Web in 3 years time and these web applications are the future, soon to become the norm? If Mozilla didn't start making moves to support it now people would be complaining that they, like Microsoft back in the 90s, failed to anticipate the future of the WWW and got left behind.

What if in the days of text only browsers people said "...but the Web is about text, we don't need no stinkin' graphics!" (yeah it's unlikely, I know, but bear with me I'm making a point here ;-) ) or when the Web was text and graphics, "...we don't need no video, we've got text and graphics!"?

What I am saying here is this: the Web evolves and browsers need to keep up with it. I know they're having a hard enough time keeping up with things like Javascript and CSS and people will argue they should get existing standards right first before trying to support anything else (to which I agree in part) but we don't really know what the Web will be in 5 or 10 years and our browsers will have to support whatever it becomes. We will have to adapt too just like those users and their browsers did back in the early days of the Web.

Mozilla's mandate for Firefox is that it would be fully compliant with the latest W3C Web standards and the W3C seems to be looking into this technology. Should Mozilla ignore it or support it?

Maybe the solution is to introduce these features as an add-on until the technology becomes more ubiquitous and then introduce it into the main build?

If you want Firefox with its original advantages and just its original features, why not use the original Firefox? Meanwhile, those who can benefit from the new technology will do so.

The only reason I can think of is that the old versions have unpatched security problems, so you'll want to upgrade after they're unsupported – but if you want the Firefox developers to stop adding new features, they're not going to still fix the security problems, they'll just move to more interesting and worthwhile projects and Firefox will die. Firefox has inertia now – and the whole web is gaining inertia, after stagnating during IE6's dominance, with even the W3C restarting realistic work on HTML – so it would be a waste if it didn't continue to grow and change.

In any case, they are planning to make future versions of Firefox faster and more secure and make the code less crufty, with better C++ usage and a better garbage collector to fix memory leaks and a new JavaScript VM. And Firefox is still only a 6MB download – it's not exactly the heaviest of programs you'll ever download.

Ah, so it's you I have to blame for this mess. Please write out the following one hundred times:

The DNS does not categorise content. The DNS does not categorise content. The DNS does not categorise content.

If you are at all familiar with computer science then you will perhaps recognise the term "layering violation".

If you want to impose content filtering on everyone then you should push for laws requiring that all pornographic, violent, obscene, etc. content be classified with a labelling system such as PICS. Instead of misusing the DNS as a totally subjective and far too-coarse grained catagorisation system, you should consult those who actually thought about this problem logically and came up with PICS.

With PICS, instead of a subjective and fundamentally inaccurate 'porn/not porn' label, you rate HTTP resources based on their actual content. For further information, consult its website and the excellent RFC 3675 entitled .sex considered harmful.

Good grief, no. Use PICS.

(See also: RFC 3675)

... like PICS. Of course, this has already been discussed in RFC 3675.

His second point is just a common misconceptions and FAQs. It doesn't require that people does that.

I have just accepted a position with a consultancy that does a fair amount of work for those cut-throat businesses. And they are interested, very interested, in fact. Which is also why Oracle, IBM, HP, even Microsoft is interested.

Typical use case for them is: So, you bought your competitor, and each of the companies sit on big valuable databases that are incompatible. You have huge data integration problem that needs solving fast. So, throw in an RDF model, which is actually a pretty simple model. Use the SPARQL query language. Now all employees have access to the data they need. Problem solved. Lots of money saved. Good.

But this is not part of the open web, you say? Indeed, you're right. So, Semantic Web technologies have allready succeeded, but not on the open web. And since I'm such an idealist, I want it on the open web. So, the blog still has a valid point.

We need to make compelling reasons why they should put (some) data on the open web. It isn't easy, but then, let TimBL tell you it wasn't easy to get them on the web in the first place. It is not very different, actually. The main approach to this is capitalise on network effects. There is a lot of public information, and we need to start with that.

So, partly, that's what I'll do. We have emergent use cases, and that's the evil part of cut-throat business. You don't talk about those before they happen. So, sorry about that. I think it will be very compelling, but it'll take a few years. If you're the risk-averse kinda developer who first and foremost has a family to feed, then I understand that you don't want to risk anything, and you can probably jump on the bandwagon a couple of years from now, having lost relatively little.

But if you, like me, like to live on the edge, and doesn't mind taking risks doing things that of course might fail, then I think semweb is one of most interesting things right now.

"But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:

• would agree on web standards (hah!)
• would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
• would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)"

One of the features of the W3C's model (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF, Dublin Core and others.

The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example.

If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.

Also, GRDDL has just made microformats a part of the Semantic Web, and I have just created a system to marry taxonomies and folksonomies, (i.e. big controlled vocabularies and tags).

There is no conflict here. People can safely use microformats for a lot of stuff (even when it doesn't make sense! :-) ) and tags are more useful than not annotate. It will all be a part of the Semantic Web, but microformats and tags far from realise the goals of the Semantic Web.

Right now, we're building semweb based trust metrics for email. I have allready plugins for SpamAssassin and Qpsmtpd, though they are for small scale stuff, we have like 25 million profiles we could use.

For example, your concerns about digital camera reviews are addressed by Revyu.

All in all, there is a lot of stuff going on in this area, both big forward-looking academic projects and practical implementations.

Have you seen GRDDL? It's a way of producing RDF/XML data from "plain XML" (although not plain CSV...), and XHTML too (and HTML if you run stuff through Tidy). It's typically W3C - a big long document to explain 'XML+XSLT=RDF', but it's pretty neat nonetheless. Anything that's even vaguely structured can be turned in to RDF very easily. The W3C made a mistake in thinking that RDF etc. would be picked up straight out of the gate in 1999 (when RDF was standardised) - instead, it's taking a rather bending path towards popularity.

There is lots of interesting stuff going on just below the surface, but because it is going on below the surface, it's very easy for people to say there's nothing going on. I have to strongly disagree with Stephen's post. If the MySpaces of the world don't want to expose APIs, that's their prerogative. It'll be uppity programmers who'll write screen scrapers to get them on the semantic web whether they want to be there or not! The market will ebb and flow, and eventually MySpace will be as dead as all the other social networks that sit on the scrapheap of the 'net. Software competes on a lot of things - features being one of them. On the Internet, a site which lets you export your data will be more valuable to the (intelligent) user than one that doesn't. As for the stupid user, well, that's a problem that the Semantic Web can't solve. Stupidity, like lying, is a problem that no amount of W3C standards can solve.

Whitelisting and search personalization. When your search engine is giving priority to people you know and trust and sites they say they trust then the spam problem is significantly lessened. The OpenID community are already using OpenID as a spam whitelisting mechanism. In the Semantic Web layer cake, there is a layer called Trust, which is based on a combination of the RDF stack and document signing and encryption. Even if that isn't the way it's approached, Trust is something that SemWeb people are concerned with. I'm in the middle of designing a SemWebby tool (can't explain it here because I haven't decided whether it's going to be free, commercial or open source etc.) and how trust is dealt with is important.

Currently, Google is the thing to spam - you pick some keywords and you try to spam them. A highly personalized version of Google that uses your friends and colleagues attention data will be a lot harder to spam. With the Semantic Web, yes, people will lie. But if people find out they lie, they can put them on a "liar's list" - just as you do mentally in real life. People lie in databases, people lie on their blogs, people lie in real life. If you expect the Semantic Web to solve a common trait that is present in a large chunk of humanity, then you need to rethink your assumptions about the Semantic Web. :)

There might not be a clear revolution, but there certainly is a lot of evolution going on. For example, compare early web pages (written a mere 15 years ago) to, say, Google Maps; I think it's safe to say that there happened more than just a move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 1.0 patch 3283".

The problem with "web 2.0" is not that the web hasn't changed dramatically, it's that the term is rooted in marketing rather than technology.

We're fast moving from "this is a big red piece of text" to "this is a heading" thanks to CSS allowing us to state that headings should be big and red.

I doubt we're ever going to be in a position where every site is marked up with RDF metadata, but a lot of sites are now offering APIs that are good enough to do the job, sure we're unlikely to have a universal API that allows us to query any website on the internet and extract the data we're looking for, but realistically what would that actually gain us?

I think we're going to see a lot more almost-standards around the web...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html

http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

Nothing on any of those pages indicated that blogging is an inherent part of the "semantic web". As best as I can tell, the semantic web people want there to be some kind of SQL language for websites, so you can type "SELECT `images` FROM `websites` WHERE `porn` > 0 AND `price` = 0 AND `subject` = 'shitting dick nipples'" instead of going to Google or something.

I guess it'd be nice to end my dependance on GOOG, but I think this naysayer guy with the blog makes some good points.