Syntactic Web is a phrase meant to describe the current, mostly HTML-based World Wide Web, in order to distinguish it from the Semantic Web, a concept in which web pages carry information that can be read and understood by machines in a systematic way. The term stems from the contrast between syntax, which is the mechanics of a language used to convey information, and semantics, which is the actual meaning of that information. On a syntactic web page, which is any document on the web that does not contain special tagging to convey meaning, meaning is difficult to parse by a computer program.
An example is a site that gives the weather for any city in the world, in HTML form. Even though the site offers dynamic, database-driven information, it is presented in a purely syntactic way. One could imagine a computer program that tried to retrieve this weather information through text parsing or "web scraping". Though it would be possible to do, if the creators of the site ever decide to change around the layout or HTML of the site, the computer program would most likely need to be rewritten in some way. In contrast, if the weather site published its data semantically, the program could retrieve that semantic data, and the site's creators could change the look and feel of the site without affecting that retrieval ability.
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Famous quotes containing the words syntactic and/or web:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)