Semantics. It’s the new word of the Web. We’re experiencing a cultural, social revolution with this technology and we’re totally and utterly unprepared for it. “Web 2.0”, they call it. Since 2004, it has become the buzzword, and, in essence, the next bubble. Businesses support it. Consumers support it. Governments are beginning to support it. And yet we’re hacking. Every time we use CSS, we hack. Every time we use XMLHTTPRequest, we hack.
1989. Tim Berners-Lee grows tired of being unable to easily access referenced informational documents, so he invents the brilliant idea of “hypermedia”, and implements respective protocols to allow linking between documents—HTTP, HTML, and URIs1— thereby initiating the Web we know and love today. It works perfectly for those means, whereby static documents are able to be easily cross-referenced and handled.
2008. Fast forward nearly 20 years. (Yes, it really has been almost 20 years since the Web was created.) We live in a bustling, content-rich, style-rich society. The Web and its associated technologies play major roles in the operation of thousands upon thousands of businesses on a day-to-day basis, and the lives of millions of people over a similar timeframe. Standards have evolved since 1989, with the development of HTTP 1.1, the progression of HTML to version 4.01 and future revisions under consideration, the push for CSS-based design, the creation of XML and an entire community of additional standards surrounding it, and, most recently, the idea that semantics should play a major part in the way the Web—and indeed computing in general—works.
And yet everything is fundamentally the same. We’re still using a set of elements to mark up our Web pages that were around in 1989. We’re still using the same basic protocol to interact with Websites that was proposed in 1989.
Ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t fit anymore. We’ve outgrown the Web of the ’90s. The spider’s dead and gone, and we’re left wrestling with its now-tangled and dusty remains.
