Making the World Wide Web a Gigantic Database of Useful Information

Sir Isaac Newton once said: If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.

With all the information now available in the Internet particularly in the World Wide Web, imagine how much farther we can see if we can stand on its shoulders. It contains every conceivable topic in the world. There is probably no subject which is not published somewhere in the vast cloud that is the Web. If we could only access all of those information, progress in every avenue and endeavor is not far. The Web is truly a giant of an information source.

The user’s desire to retrieve information from the Web can be shown in Google’s rise to fame. When it first started, Google provided nothing much other than the ability to search the Web for pure information unadulterated with advertising which the users were not getting from the search engines of that time. The fact that Google not only survived but thrived is a sure indicator of the user’s need to access information.

But even Google could not search and index all of the pages of information in the Web. The unstructured nature of documents make information retrieval difficult. If the the World Wide Web were a database, it is one where a lot of data cannot be accessed. Those inaccessible data are a waste. Unlike discrete data like names and dates which can easily be stored in a data field, pages of posts and articles do not lend themselves to be stored and retrieved as easily. The answer to this is structural markup like XML.

Modern web standards have been developed to address this situation. HTML 4.01, for example, is a W3C recommendation which is based on SGML. XHTML 1.1, based on XML, is also another step in the right direction. These standards, particularly the XML based XHTML 1.1 and the soon to come XHTML 2, would greatly aid in making the Web an easily searchable index of information.

The problem is that these standards are just that—standards. Browsers and web designers can and do ignore them. Even with these modern standards which has the potential of organizing the information on the Web, designers still cling to the old ways.

One of the reasons why this is so is Internet Explorer. Quite a lot of users use it; not by choice, but because it comes with their Microsoft Windows installation. The problem is that this browser does not recognize proper XHTML. This leaves web designers no choice but to serve XHTML in a way it was not designed to be thereby negating a lot of the benefits XHTML has to offer. If they did not do so, a lot of their IE equipped viewers might not be able to view their pages properly or at all.

This hinders progress in the Web which affects everybody to the point that even IE’s competitor, Mozilla (the maker of Firefox), is willing to go the extra mile to make IE standards compliant if it cannot do so on its own. Here’s a portion of a story I found in Ars Technica through Wisdump.com:

Most browser implementors are quick to adopt emerging Internet technologies, but Microsoft can't or won't make Internet Explorer a modern web browser. Despite some positive steps in the right direction, Internet Explorer still lacks many important features. Its mediocrity has arguably hampered the evolution of the web and forced many site designers to depend on suboptimal proprietary solutions.

IE's shortcomings won't hold back the Internet for much longer, however, because Mozilla plans to drag IE into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft's help. One of the first steps towards achieving this goal is a new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla's implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer.

I heard that the latest incarnation of IE which is IE 8 (still in beta at the moment) will be more standards compliant than the current IE 7. I don’t know if this includes proper XML support. If it does, then the Web just might be the information database I hope it would be. As of the moment, the most standards compliant browser is Firefox which you can download by clicking here. Aside from standards compliance, this browser also offers more for the Web users which you can read about in the following links:

• Top Ten Reasons to Switch
• Why Use Firefox Instead of Other Browsers?
• A CNET Review on Internet Explorer 7 vs. Firefox 2

Hopefully, if everybody could pull their acts together and put the common good in the forefront instead of their own proprietary interests, designers and content authors would not have to live with those limitations and the power of the Web could be fully utilized for the benefit of all.