It's fair to say that there's a vast difference between assessing the usefulness of the technical output in this day and age on the one hand, and looking at past context - the decision processes, incumbents, power dynamics,... - in which that output was established.

> There is a popular perception that the internet standards bodies didn’t do much from the finalization of HTTP 1.1 and HTML 4.01 in 2002 to when HTML 5 really got on track. This period is also known (only by me) as the Dark Age of XHTML.

I think that's hindsight bias talking.

Who knew at the time how the next 20 years would play out. Google was just in it's infancy. Internet Explorer dominated the browser market and the same concerns - vendor lock-in and proprietary protocols - were just as much a thing back then as they are today.

HTML5 could emerge because of the wide adoption of XHTML and web standards by developers and designers. Not despite the existence of XHTML. The latter is just heavily colored value attribution on the part of the author.

> The truth is though, the standardization folks were fantastically busy. They were just doing things which ultimately didn’t prove all that valuable.

I think this applies to literally any sizable enterprise as rising complexity diminishes predictability. The only way to find out whether or not a complex enterprise is valuable is... by going down that road and test your ideas.

The implication made here is a take against standards bodies not following market dynamics - doing market research; following dominant technologies - but instead impose their own principled vision on a market.

But that's a false dichotomy. If anything, standards bodies are committees in part made up of people who are also affiliated or represent incumbents in the marketplace. And in part they are made up of people who defined interests groups outside of commercial ventures such as academia, research, public governance, and so on.

The output of a standards body is by very definition a compromise that doesn't tailor the specific needs and wants of a single actor. That's actually a good thing.

> I hate the narrative of the Semantic Web because the focus has been on the wrong set of things for a long time.

The author is correct. The RDF spec has a lot of shortcomings. And the Semantic Web discussion was a difficult debate for a long time because things hadn't coalesced in a clear vision. And that's not a bad thing.

Context matters. At that time, nobody knew what the SemWeb was supposed to become or into what it would evolve. It was simply an idea and there were a few tacit attempts to work in a problem space that wasn't fully charted yet. It's hard to navigate if you don't know the lay of the land, right?

This blogpost was written when the final recommendation of JSON-LD was published. And that specification could only emerge after it was clear that the direction of the debate wasn't leading to nowhere.

All I see is a normal evolution of things in an R&D context. By the same token, you could argue that the telegraph was a useless device because usage declined and nobody is using that technology anymore. But then you'd disregard the fact that the existence and use of telegraphs inspired others to create improvements such as the telephone or the radio.