Comment by echelon
9 hours ago
Google on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic.
They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible.
They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
> They dumped microformats and standards
I'm not sure they killed microformats, they still support hReview, hProduct etc, don't they?
And they pushed schema.org. I wrote a trivial recipe importing tool that just works™ on a bunch of website because it uses the JSON-LD Recipe schema. It's ~100 lines and a ton simpler than what I had to write 15 years ago.
Sure, they pushed for HTML5-style stuff, but that's not much of killing things.
IMO it's not google that stopped microformats: it's that website owners realized most of the time it was advantaging third parties for no advantage to them.