If the next "version" of the web is all about semantics, why aren't more people using microformats?

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The semantic web is a pipedream. It's never, ever going to happen. The whole idiotic scheme hinges on the notion that people are going to spend a whole bunch of extra time adding intelligent metadata to their data. Never. Going. To. Happen.<p>I find it far more likely that we'll have built a practical AI before the semantic web ever happens, at which point all semantic efforts will be obsolete.<p>Of course, if there's anything more masturbatory than the semantic web, it's microformats. Hey! You there! Don't link to a vcard object, that's yesterday's deal. Instead, painstakingly reproduce your vcard in XML! Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it. Lets take a widely supported data format that many people already have, and turn it in to a completely unsupported, poorly specified fantasy format. Then you can maintain two copies of the same data! Endless fun.<p>It's just a symptom of the general web malaise. Am I crazy or was it once possible for real human beings to write web pages? You know, before you had to remember 90 pages of how CSS worked? The W3C these days seems to be where small minds go to die, and even TBL isn't helping.

Woah. Back up there.<p>1) Who says there will be a "next version of the web"<p>2) Who says it will be "about" anything? How can a decentralized communications network be "about" something? What planet are you from?<p>3) See jamess's comment<p>As for microformats, it's mainly been embraced by navel-gazing bloggers who don't write much code if at all.

One of my professors is nuts about the semantic web. This same professor believes Ray Kurzweil; I don't think it's a coincidence.

I see half-and-half solutions as more possible: slightly smarter markup and much smarter web spiders would reap about as much benefit as a fully semantic web. I mean, just marking headers properly in &#60;h\d&#62; tags rather than &#60;font size="\d"&#62; and quotes in &#60;quote&#62; is a pretty decent hint for sniffing out semantically important text, and having grammar parsers for named entities like proper names and addresses and dates and such that are as forgiving with that text as BeautifulSoup is with the terrible HTML out there is a good amount of work in the right direction. I worked on a research project doing just that for two years and you can get a LOT of useful information out of a lot of modern HTML pages just by applying some simple statistical/AI magic to it. Anything more sophisticated would be near impossible without a breakthrough bordering on miracle.

Coming from a non-techie perspective, the reason I'm not using it is because its all way too confusing. I mean, have you read an article about this stuff? Everyone defines it in different ways, hardly anyone can explain with specificity what exactly it will do for you, and its very hard for anyone to found out information about what to do when or where. By that I mean, no one has told me what I can do as a non-programmer. Business people won't start using it until there is a specific advantage to doing it, but no one can point that out yet. Furthermore, I haven't been able to find a way to figure this out without hiring someone. For example, I have a TypePad blog. So someone explain what I'm supposed to do, how it will help me, and how I will do it. In a way that doesn't involve coding. I dare you.

We're not even done with the current version of the web, let alone getting started on the next!<p>Take your time, what's the rush?

I publish data in microformats whenever I get the chance. It's not hard, it doesn't take long and the added classes aren't doing any harm. If microformats drift away and the possibilities never eventuate, what harm has been done? It's just semantic markup.

They probably don't know just yet that the "next version" of the web is about semantics. Maybe someone should inform them about this?!

When Google says, "Use Microformats," or starts indexing hCards, or gives bonus pagerank for it, it will happen.<p>Until that day, or the day Google dies, there's not much point.

The reason is that microformats are a perversion of CSS/HTML. CSS is not markup; it is to define visual style. I think it rather humorous that web "developers" rejoiced at the leaps and bounds HTML made when it went from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. One of the reasons is that browsers made up what ever HTML tags they saw fit. XHTML provided a way to define a standard set of tags and attributes and give application developers the means to extend them without breaking other peoples code. This includes semantic descriptions.<p>Most of the arguments for using microformats are forgetting that many smart people have already, more or less, solved the content description issue. Thats what the X in XHTML is. By specifying that XHTML is valid XML, you can abide by all the rules for XML... mainly the extensible portion. You can add custom attributes to any tag you feel. There are DTDs, XSD, RelaxNG, Schemetron, etc; DTDs and XSD seem to have won the battle over document definitions. The only arguments against custom XHTML attributes are becoming more and more irrelevant. Arguments based on browser support for custom XSD or DTD documents are already irrelevant because most browsers have, or will, add support for them as a requirement to support novel things like XSLT. Arguments that DTDs and Schemas are two difficult are not really arguments. They are difficult for a reason, semantic definition is difficult. Many of the problems with microformats, i.e. namespace collisions, have been "solved" in the various XML standards. There are already many, many tools for parsing and using XML including namespaces, XIncludes, XSD, DTD, XSLT, etc... However, the tools to make microformats actually usable and useful, do not exist. Other arguments about custom attributes not being XHTML Strict valid are also irrelevant. Adding custom attributes by definition shouldn't be strict valid. Strict validity is checked against the xhtml1-strict.dtd DTD. Not being XHTML strict valid isn't a bad thing as long as the document is still valid XML and a schema/DTD document exists to prove it. This is, in my opinion, a major flaw in microformats. There is no source of validity. Anyone can use any thing for microformat descriptions. There is no perception of validity what so ever.<p>Most of the arguments for microformats, especially coming from the community tend towards ignorance of details. When you don't fully understand the details of the XML roots of XHTML, you tend to try and hack it or reinvent the wheel. Really diving into XML technology beyond XHTML sheds insight and vision on where the XML trend is moving, why, and where XHTML can follow along.<p>The only questionably valid arguments are for the current landscape not fully supporting XHTML+XML. However, as I have stated, that is quickly becoming a non-issue. You can also argue that XML wasn't meant to be the solution to the semantic web... but I ask, why isn't it? Tell me why a language designed to mark-up any data cannot describe the semantics of that data?