Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ Just as the interlinking power of the World Wide Web sucked all available documents into its maw—encouraging people to digitize them, convert them into HTML, give them a URL, and put them on the Internet (hell, as we speak Google is even doing this to entire libraries) —the programmable Web will pull all applications within its grasp. The benefits that come from being connected are just too powerful to ultimately resist. ”

“ Well, we've been through a lot together, you and I. We've built up an application from its humble URLs to its high-falutin' notions of democracy. Along the way, we've made its world safe for robots, query systems, researchers, and Richard Stallman. But how do we get from this kind of website to the grand vision of the Semantic Web we've heard so much about?
Let's start by realizing that just being on the Web is an amazing thing. URLs provide a unified addressing scheme for any document—a pretty miraculous thing. ”

“ And so, it is striking to consider—almost shocking, in fact—what the world might be like when our software turns to the Web just as frequently and casually as we do. Today, of course, we can see the faint, future glimmers of such a world. There is software that phones home to find out if there’s an update.There is software where part of its content—the help pages, perhaps, or some kind of catalog—is streamed over the Web. There is software that sends a copy of all your work to be stored on the Web. ”

“ Large portions of the Mac OS X operating system are also open source, including WebKit, the core of Safari, the Mac OS X web browser.
The open source and free software movements have now built free alternatives for just about every major type of computer application, from word processing to video games. And for a time it seemed like Stallman’s dream had come true: one could truly continue to use computers without having laws restrict one’s freedom—it was possible “to get along without any software that is not free.” ”

“ Search engines don’t just look at the content of a page to decide whether it’s a good result for someone’s search, they also look at the URL which, because it’s so limited, is given special weight. But if your URLs are just numbers, they’re unlikely to have anything that matches people’s search engine queries, making them less likely to be found in search results. ”

“ Sweeping is fun at first—it gives you a little time to get lost in thought about your web application while you’re doing an ostensibly-useful repetitive-motion activity—but soon you grow tired of it. But liberal guilt and those Barbara Ehrenreich articles you read make you resistant to hiring a maid. So instead of importing a hard-up girl from a foreign country to do your housework, you hire a robot. ”

“ Too often, an API is bolted on top of an existing application, as an afterthought or a completely separate piece. But, as we’ll see, when a web application is designed properly, APIs naturally grow out of it and require little effort to maintain.
Then we’ll look into what it means for your application to be not just another tool for people and software to use, but part of the ecology—a section of the programmable web. This means exposing your data to be queried and copied and integrated, even without explicit permission, into the larger software ecosystem, while protecting users’ freedom. ”

“ It’s hard to imagine, for example, building particularly useful tools that work across different JSON APIs, the way web browsers work across all different kinds of HTML pages. Each JSON API has its own internal representations and conventions and protocols, which means you need to write special code to deal with each different one.
That’s where RDF comes in. The idea behind it is simple: what if we had a format that did to data what HTML did to documents—provide a single, consistent representation for them that supports the hypertextual nature of the Web. ”

“ And for people who use kiosk computers or Internet cafes, that future is already here.
For some, this is an exciting prospect. But for those, like Stallman, concerned with issues of software freedom, it is frightening. Even in the dark days of the proprietary printer driver, Stallman still had control over the computer which drove the printer, even if he did not have the source code to modify it. But with a Web 2.0 application, you don’t have even that. The computer running your software is locked away in some distant server farm. You can only communicate with it through your web browser. ”

“ You make sure the place is set up so that the robot can do its job without doing any real damage.
It’s exactly the same on the Web. (Except without the dust, crumbs, Jetsons, maids, tire treads, vases, coins, or blinds.) Robots (largely from search engines, but others come from spammers, offline readers, and who knows what else) are always crawling your site, leaving no nook or cranny unexplored, vacuuming up anything they can find. And unlike the household variety, you cannot simply unplug them—you really have to be sure to keep things clean. ”

“ So aside from being simpler, easier, more featureful, safer, and faster than XML, what does JSON have to offer? Well, it has one killer feature that’s guaranteed its place atop the format wars: because it’s based on JavaScript, it has a deep compatibility with web browsers.
You’ve probably heard about AJAX, a technique that uses the XmlHttpRequest function in modern web browsers to allow web pages to initiate their own HTTP requests to get more data. But, for security reasons, XmlHttpRequest is only permitted to request pages on the same domain as the web page it initiates from. ”

“ This solves their immediate problem of figuring out what to write on the t-shirt, but it doesn’t solve any of the more fundamental problems, and it doesn’t make it possible for everyone else to make their own t-shirts or send out their own emails.
If your tools don’t let you design your URLs, you need to get better tools. Nobody would dare do graphic design with software that didn’t let them change the font or paint with a brush that could only make squares. Yet some people think it’s perfectly fine to sacrifice control over their URLs, the most fundamentally important part of your website. ”