Model-View-Controller

First there was Last.fm’s site redesign, now there’s Facebook’s. Both have been given a hard time, however I don’t personally give a flying fuck about their website design. The ONLY useful thing from last.fm is the artist information. Fuck the personal statistics. Fuck the Shoutboxes. Fuck the Friends. The ONLY reason accounts exist is to prevent spamming which would skew the artist information database. So, do you want to see how last.fm REALLY looks? Well there are a few styles: text and XML. There is also an API (Application Programmer’s Interface) available, but it requires an account to use so it can go and die in a bin.

If you are particularly clueless about how computers work then you might be thinking to yourself “those look like shit”, and you would be right. However, structure is FAR more important than presentation, and those documents are well structured. The reason thinking along those lines is clueless is because such people have never seen a computer program, they’ve never pressed the View Source button in their Web browser and they’ve never taken apart any gadgets in their life. Those of you who have done at least one of those things will know that beauty is only skin deep. A website might look pretty, but the HTML the pages are made of look as ugly as sin. The HTML will have a decent structure though, which means a Web browser can be stuck in between the user and the HTML to make it look pretty.

What I am saying is that last.fm allow access to their database in a structured way, which allows applications (which are completely stupid and need to be told exactly what to do, hence the need for structure) to display the data in whatever the hell way the user wants. You don’t need to use their website, since code for putting data into and getting data from last.fm exists inside every decent music player (Amarok, Banshee, Listen, etc.). Your choice of application is completely up to you, and you can keep using that application for as long as last.fm’s web services maintain their current structure. If the structure or protocol or something changes, then that’s not too bad for anyone using a well written piece of Free Software. If you’re using a proprietary program to display it then you’re knackered and I hope you’ve learned a valuable lesson.

Now let’s look at the recent Facebook change. Can I access Facebook’s database via a well defined and structured interface? Can I bollocks. That means I’m stuck with whatever the almighty Facebook deities bestow upon me, and I’d better pray that I like it because it’s all they allow me. Thank fuck I don’t use it.

For those of you who haven’t realised it by now I am talking about the Semantic Web and the Model View Controller architecture. In the World Wide Web the stuff that gets passed around is HTML. That HTML can contain any data, is layed out in a certain way and the structure is very freeform, as long as it meets a few rules defined in the HTML and XHTML standards. The Semantic Web is different. In the Semantic Web the data is structured in a very specific way, in RDF triples to be precise. There is NO layout in the Semantic Web, since it is not about anything visual like pages, it is about concepts and meaning. Applications you use which can access the Semantic Web (there are as many as people can create, rather than the Web’s singleton the Web Browser) can do whatever the hell they like with the structured information they receive. There’s no arguments about the layout and look of a semantic Facebook because there’s NO SUCH THING as the “layout” or “look” of anything on the Semantic Web. The layout and look are ENTIRELY up to the user and which program they decide to view it with. Some users may even view it with applications they access via the World Wide Web.

PS: I would just like to point out the first sentence of Wikipedia’s World Wide Web article:

“The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.” Thank you.