Tim Berners-Lee's List

weink writes "Tim Berners-Lee has made a career out of resolving Internet pet peeves. Ten years after he invented the Web, making the Internet user friendly, he is still drafting lists of things that could work better. "

Comments

RDF Realistic?

[Cassius]

Looking at the quality of 90% of the web pages out there, I think it is probably unrealistic that people will being applying RDF in an intelligent way.

In fact, using RDF in a fractured or improper way may even be more detrimental than good 'ol heuristics. Malformed RDF will send syntactically correct, but semantically incorrect metadata to a search engine equipped to handle it. This is a dnagerous combination - it makes bad search results more precisely wrong. I'd rather that have good guess than a precisely wrong answer.

It ultimately boils down to whether you trust users to be able to describe their own metadata. I don't. Perhaps a good apporach is to have centralized servers attempt to create correct RDF files based on a set of common criteria. While this is still a flawed approach, I would rather have search results that are consistent (consistently wrong or consistently right) than try to get inside the psychology of each individuals web designer's implementation of RDF metadata. This approach might also cut down on metadata abuse (trying to bump up page in searches where it should not rank highly, etc).

In other words, I think we're way way off solving the metadata/search issue. For now, the best answer seems to be human categorization (yahoo) or smart smart heuristics (google, inktomi).

metadata on the web is unreliable

[Billy_Pilgrim]

I'm sorry to say this, but I hate the idea of META tags on the web. I have been an avid net user since 93, just before the browser boom. When the browsers first came out, the search engines were still based on the text of a web page. Today, you are lucky to find such a tool. Most popular engines rely on the META tags, as if the general population had some kind of superior abstraction skills.

At one time, you could force AltaVista to only show pages containing certain text or URL's. While those options are still accepted by the engine, they are largely ignored. As a user I am annoyed when I ask a search engine to only show me pages that actually contain certain strings, only to navigate to the page and turn up empty on a find.

I have actually gone from 'portal' surfing (early Yahoo) to search-based surfing, back to 'portal' surfing. The web is hairy enough that I actually *do* want someone to filter out the crap for me, unless I am looking for something extremely specific and unhappy with the portal-based results.

I do agree with some of his other thoughts, about form submission and URL changing. . .