alt Hacker NewsLike other commenters have said, this is 25 years too late, and it's made even more irrelevant by modern tech.
"The Semantic Web" and all related ideas were always a failure. The metadata quickly got out of date, was never correct in the first place, was only ever implemented on a teeny minority of sites, and always suffered from bad actors where the metadata didn't match the content.
Heck, even before LLMs I'd argue that Google won because they were the best at organizing vast amounts of unstructured data. With LLMs it's even more pointless to have the author generate this metadata - better to have an LLM generate it based on what visitors can actually see when they visit the site.
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JSON-LD is 12 years old. Just four years after Facebook introduced Open Graph to make their links prettier. Maybe an appeal to implement it today is 25 years too late. But there were plenty of appeals 10 years ago, or to implement open graph 15 years ago
The concept will re-emerge somehow. Webpages are 99.99% of the time the formatting of a data structure for humans. LLM can barely infer that data structure from the webpage and connect it with other data structure of other pages. [truth is that the LLM algorithm does not do that AT ALL internally, but from our user experience it really looks like it does].
But when webpages die and data is accessed only by machine2machine APIs, we will no longer have this formatting for humans. Then we will need API-literate LLMs. Which means LLMs that can connect the dots between shitloads of unconnected JSONs. And if we don’t hint it for which connections are existing between that chaos of APIs, it will not be able to apply its magic. In short: we need to be able to bring JSON to vector space. And it is absolutely not meant for that, by default.