[Groxx]

I have some hope that this'll all lead to a revival of semantic web / microformats / etc. Why write an API when you can just add some markup to your existing API, which already looks like stuff that it was trained on, and won't fall out of sync (because you use it too)?

[troupo]

> I have some hope that this'll all lead to a revival of semantic web / microformats / etc

Why would it? Do you see any agents or models use that? No, instead vibe coders at Anthropic vibe-designed a bespoke protocol that sidesteps and ignores the last 60 years of API development and integrations.

[brookst]

Different levels.

Yes, MCP is a hack that could have been carefully built on prior art, and it would have been better for it.

Yes, MCP is capable of expressing that prior art, and you can do semantic web concepts even if the wire protocol looks different.

[troupo]

> Different levels.

How are they different?

> Yes, MCP is capable of expressing that prior art, and you can do semantic web concepts even if the wire protocol looks different.

What are you talking about?!

[brookst]

> How are they different?

Take a look at Semantic Web[1]

SW is about data interchange and standardizing semantic representations… it relies on formal, structured taxonomies of All The Nouns and then All The Verbs For Those Nouns.

MCP is structured at the protocol level, but its whole value is the bridge from structured to unstructured: natural language agent intents to specific APIs, domain-specific data to fuzzy natural language.

Semantic Web only works if someone has clearly defined the domain you want to operate in. MCP can work without that kind of definition (an API or prompt needs to exist, but it doesn’t need to be modeled in any way similar to RDF)

> What are you talking about?!

For instance, MCP-to-SPARQL bridge[2] that lets agents query SW data.

1. https://www.w3.org/wiki/SemanticWebArchitecture

2. https://pypi.org/project/mcp-server-sparql/

[troupo]

Ah. I see what you mean. I was mixed up in a side conversation and didn't catch on to what you meant originally.

[PaulHoule]

That was exactly my thought when I saw MCP: like we know so much about creating protocols but get a bunch of people together with no experience and that’s what you get.

Reminds me a lot of Microsoft’s WS-disaster of the early 2000s except the latter was thought through a little better.

To be fair a while back I did design an API for a general purpose model trainer which was absolutely atrocious for a few reasons, my own ignorance was a factor but the problem of accommodating everything from “model that can be trained in 30 seconds on a small machine” to “model that takes 30 days of training on a cluster” problematized it.

It would have made so much more sense to build a standard for documenting ordinary API endpoints and CLIs.

[flaburgan]

You mean a swagger?

[Groxx]

It even has a catchy name that certainly won't get confused for the LLM company: OpenAPI.

[PaulHoule]

yes

[iamacyborg]

I definitely see it going that way from a marketing perspective if you want what you send/produce to be machine readable and actually used in intermediated surfaces like email and web search.