BC Museums Association Conference 2005: Website Usability Workshop
The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of the Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools. (http://wikipedia.org)
Somewhat complicated reduction: describing content semantically, or according to its purpose (XML, XHTML), instead of by its location on the page (HTML)
A little less complicated reduction: separating style from content
On top of HTML's inherent limitations, it has been manipulated and "hacked" to do things it is not meant to.
Tables should be used for tabular data: calendars, lists, etc. Tables have necessarily become the layout tool for HTML.
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By carefully separating style from content we get (in the best situations):
machine readable
gracefully degradable
adaptable
accessible