Why Don’t We Have Agents  Today?
•Information on the World Wide Web is based on HTML •HTML is intended only for the visual presentation of information for humans to understand •The best you can do is some form of word lookup •There is no syntactic, semantic or logic description of the information
•Information is not machine readable
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Algol = Ship, Star, Computer Language?
What is keeping us from developing and using software agents today? HTML is wonderful. It has carried us a long way as the Web has grown and it will continue to serve us well. However, HTML markup is only designed to control how information appears in our Web browsers. It tells the Web browser if the information is to be displayed large or small, what color it will appear, and whether is will be in a frame or table. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about the meaning of the information. That is strictly up to us as humans to interpret. The fundamental problem is that the great bulk of the information on the Web is not machine readable and that must change before real progress can be made in the development of cyber agents.