Out of the way

OK, the first bit of good news is that this isn't yet another in what threatened to become a series about death and misery

It is about a cool piece of technology instead. Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, has spent a fair bit of the last decade trying to get people to understand why the "Semantic Web" might be useful. In my time at W3C that was a large piece of what I worked on, too, spending a couple of years motivating development in Europe, writing tutorials, and so on.

A few months ago he made a little demo project called Tabulator - an Ajax-based Semantic Web browser. More recently he announced a new version that had got pretty cool, so last week I found someone who had some spare time to debug his code and make it work across platforms, so we could make a tabulator widget.

You can now download the widget (in Opera 9+) and you have a generic RDF browser running on your desktop - Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris...

It is still not the ultimate semantic web application (and as a colleague said, it isn't really very very pretty although it has improved over its lifetime), but I think it begins to hint at some of the real power the technology can bring - a few projects were very easily combined (widgetising took about 30 minutes, debugging the code a couple of days more).

Thanks to JibberJim for his parser, Gorm for making it cross platform, Tim and the rest of the Tabulator team for making Tabulator, and David Håsäther for taking the time to actually widgetise and debug to make it a reality.