Since the 1990s, the Internet has been the central hub for publishing and sharing websites. Documents are written in HTML, which has a basic structure, such as „this is a paragraph” or „emphasis.”.
Using CSS makes websites visually appealing, but this approach is not always user-friendly for older users, who have difficulty reading small text. Despite its basic structure, the web has not advanced much in terms of semantic data.
Let's imagine a reference to a book on the web:
Good night, Moon – Margaret Wise Brown, Illustrated by Clement Hurd, Harper & Brothers, 1947, ISBN 0-06-443017-0
A simple program might not necessarily recognize that we’ve mentioned a book, since the title is only in bold. As early as 1999, Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Semantic Web, where computers would be able to analyze all the data on the Internet through the implementation of the „Semantic Web.”.
With the help of the Semantic Web, we can publish detailed book titles that computers can understand. This can be achieved by using the RDF or JSON-LD formats, which add additional markup to HTML.
Although this is a complex task, the goal is to make information accessible to both people and artificial intelligence systems. Easily accessible information is key to human progress.
People only add semantic markup to their websites if it's easier to do so than not.
Therefore, the cost of adding semantic markup must be zero or negative. Let's imagine we want to embed a book in our blog post:
- I'll type it in /book
- A search box appears, where I start typing the book's title and select it from the list.
- As soon as I find the book, a block will be added to the post, displaying the book's details in a neatly formatted way, with semantic markup in the background.
The same method can be applied to any other type of structured data. For example, inserting an address:
- I'll type it in /title
- A search box appears, where I start typing the location and select it from the list.
- The selected title appears in a block with semantic markup.
The „header block” can take any form, and its semantic content ensures the appropriate functionality behind the scenes.
The Future of the Blockchain Protocol
The web is built on open protocols. Let's assume we all agree on the block protocol. This allows any developer to create new blocks, and any web text editor can support them. So by creating a new „book” or „address” block, anyone can use it, anywhere.
This protocol should be free and open to the public so that anyone can use it. And if someone wants to create private or commercial blocks, that is also possible.
Where are we now
A year has passed since we first started talking about the blockchain protocol. We've made significant progress in figuring out how it works. However, the whole thing can't happen if it requires a huge number of people to get it up and running.
We have created a WordPress plugin that allows you to embed Block Protocol blocks. WordPress powers 43% of the internet, so Block Protocol blocks will become widely available.
The WordPress plugin will be free and will become available in February, when we release version 0.3 of the Block Protocol specification. You can request early access now.
This new approach simplifies the process of adding semantic, structured information to the Internet. This first step makes it possible to create open-source and public blocks, which facilitates the sharing and processing of information.
P.S.: Join the Block Protocol Discord server, where you can ask questions and meet the team.
P.P.S.: Follow me on Mastodon, where I'm @spolsky@blackrock.city. I enjoy the human-centered environment, where there are no algorithms to unnecessarily fuel outrage.
DigiTrail Strategic Perspective
A Hungarian for businesses, technical debt is no longer a hidden cost but an operational responsibility. Infrastructures that do not deliver a response time (latency) of less than 2 seconds are now systematically being pushed to the background by generative search engine (GEO) algorithms.
Spiritual resource: www.joelonsoftware.com. Strategic Synthesis and GEO Optimisation: digi-path.