Over the past few weeks I've been doing a bit of research (when I have time) into the whole idea of the semantic web. The "Semantic Web" is in essence a way to structure all the data on the web into set formats so it's easier to read by machines ... in essence it's creating tons of metadata so that we can (hopefully) do something with all that data.

The "Semantic Web" can range from the way you mark up your HTML pages to the actual syndication of data so it's all free flowing. I've always felt strongly that syndication of data into set formats is one way to ensure the survival of any site (rather than destroy it). Much like I posted earlier about Tabulets, I'm determined to eventually fully syndicate all data for use by any party (except data designated as being private by the owner).

The biggest issue I've taken with the "Semantic Web" is how anal everyone is. I've grown up marking up webpages in any way that works, but the SW (I'm shortening it because I'm getting tired of writing it out) implies that there is a few "right" ways of doing stuff.

At first I was pretty resistant to mark up HTML pages in certain ways ... but the more I work on Tabulas, the more it makes sense. I've been slowly starting to utilize more CSS-heavy designs and am utilizing less and less div class declarations and more of the natural HTML tags (h1, h2, em, strong, etc.).

Once I get the time, I'm going to make every one of my default Tabulas templates CSS liquid with fully semantic markup so that it's not JUST XHTML1.0 compliant in law, but also in spirit. It's important we remember that the spirit of the law and the letter of the law are quite different.

After my advanced organic chem exam, I came back and started working out a new feature for Tabulas - categories. I've been spending a lot of time working on the new feature, but also fixing up errors along the way. Because of the complexity of categories in integrating it with the existing Tabulas infrastructure, I've had to go back and look through hundreds of lines of uncommented code I wrote months ago. I spent a lot of time fixing up old code (making it more efficient and slowly commenting it) ... but also creating a new "standard" way of displaying stuff in the admin panel.

The admin panel for Tabulas is quite a mess right now. I need to figure out _one_ way of displaying the data then do it like that. The control panel isn't as consistent as I'd like it to be. So that's another huge project to add on my 'to-do' list.

So far, I've gotten the administrator's portion of the categories done, but now I need to figure out how to do the output. Gah.