pondering 'open web' computer things
Every time I read about stuff like RDF and other 'modern open web' things, I just get sad, because... I can see the dream, but it never had any real chance of the widespread success that it was going for.
Commercial developers wouldn't adopt it because it doesn't align with their incentives. Hobbyists wouldn't adopt it because the terminology is impenetrable to them.
It's not hard to see why it never became The Thing Everyone Uses, and I'm pretty sure it could've been avoidable.
re: pondering 'open web' computer things
And like, there are plenty of cool ideas in there, that *could* have worked, had they been made more broadly accessible.
The Wikipedia article about SPARQL kind of rubs salt in the wound here, with a great example; it describes "subject-predicate-object", and states that it is analogous to "document-key-value".
One of those is easy to understand and remember. The other is the canonical term for this concept in RDF-land.
re: pondering 'open web' computer things
Historically, I've seen a lot of defenses of this sort of jargon by arguing "but the simple term isn't correct!"
And like, does it matter? Do you want something that is 'correct on paper' (by your understanding of language, that is!), or do you want something that is Good Enough and that people can *use*, that enjoys successful adoption?
