I think the thing that happened, is the OS vendors spent too much time addicted to the web themselves, and forgot that one of the duties of the core OS of any device is to serve data from it, safely and securely, to any other device.

Instead, most stacks are designed to enforce a walled garden, from which very little is shareable unless you go through the gateway (the web client app) to some approved destination.

Semantic web and total availability at the personal-computer level, are aspects of OS design I wish had been paid more attention.

Basically what we have now is a very, very expensive system of dumb terminals.

The semantic web will never work because there is no way to enforce it. If the topic "horses" become popular people will just start tagging their spam pages with "horse" to try to get people to look at their pages.

As an example go look at the tags on soundcloud. People tag their songs with whatever they think will get people to take a listen.

> The semantic web will never work because there is no way to enforce it. If the topic "horses" become popular people will just start tagging their spam pages with "horse" to try to get people to look at their pages.

There are plenty of trusted sources that would not spam their pages in this way. And if you spam too much, you risk getting dropped from search indexes, directories, links etc. because your source is just not useful.

Dishonesty is a problem the web always faces, whether it's lying to a person or to a search-engine.

It's not as if the semweb people weren't aware of the problem, and it's not self-evidently a fatal blow to the idea.