Semantic Web, With a Side of PDF

Alex Iskold’s Semantic Web Patterns article at RWW is a good answer to the question: what is the semantic web again? Or rather, it’s a good set of answers, since there are lots of pieces to the semantic web.

Therefore I had to smile when Alex pointed out that ReadWrite Richard placed it at the top of his web trends list. There are so many pieces that some of them are bound to fall into place, maybe even this year.

One of the more interesting-sounding pieces is Dapper’s Semantify, which makes sites readable by semantic search engines. I would have used Semantify on this blog, but the code it generates for inclusion in sites wouldn’t get past the WordPress.com security bots.

Alex’s article is very long for a blog post, so I printed it out to read it. Unfortunately, as often happens when printing blogs, what came out of the printer wasn’t what I was expecting. There was only one page of the article itself.

So I searched for an html to pdf converter. To be more specific, I Googled for one that is web-based and free. I ended up using a couple of them. First was ExpressPDF. You give it the URI and it emails you the PDF a little later. While I was waiting, I tried PDF-o-matic, which generates the PDF right away.

While each worked well, I’ll incline toward ExpressPDF in future. Its PDF was a more direct and compact copy of the web page than was PDF-o-matic’s.

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