Conversations with Robots: Voice, Smart Agents & the Case for Structured Content

1. What is the difference between structured content and semantic HTML?

Structured Content emphasizes planning, modeling, and annotating content "outside the interface," making it into discrete units of information that are machine-understandable, reusable, and recombinable across different channels. This type of content design facilitates aggregation and inference by search engines and intelligent agents, independent of the visual presentation of a specific page.

2. How do they work together?

Structured content defines "what the content is" and "what fields/relationships it has," while Semantic HTML is responsible for publishing these structures in understandable web markup. Once you establish entities and attributes like "people," "events," and "works" in your CMS/content model, the page layer can be clearly presented using lists, and heading hierarchies. This makes it easier for search engines and intelligent agents to crawl and reuse these fragments, enabling aggregation and inference.

3. Why is it important to use both on the web?

Cross-channel and reusability: Structured content allows information to be combined and reused across multiple interfaces, such as web pages, apps, smart speakers, and chatbots, avoiding the "locking" of knowledge in a single page layout; this is fundamental to addressing the "aggregation and inference" content consumption model of intelligent agents.Accessibility and Comprehensibility: Semantic HTML improves screen reading, keyboard navigation, and search indexing, helping both humans and machines more quickly understand hierarchy and focus.

Three websites that are similar to my semester project idea

Here are some existing clothing e-commerce websites that are similar to my semester project idea:

Required Readings Reflections

1. Denise Jacobs compares our inner critic to a troll that blocks creativity. Among the strategies she suggests, the method that works best for me is reframing negative self-talk. By recognizing when my inner critic is active and intentionally replacing those thoughts with encouraging ones, I can move forward with my ideas instead of feeling stuck. This method is effective because it directly addresses my tendency to doubt myself during creative work.

2. In David McRaney’s article and video, hyperbolic discounting is described as the tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. One of the strategies he mentions to counter this is using precommitment setting deadlines or external commitments in advance so that procrastination is less likely. For me, precommitment works best because I stay more motivated when I know others are expecting me to deliver something by a specific time.

3. The reading explains that networks involve four forms of power: architectural, gatekeeping, connective, and programmatic. As a student web creator, I do have some architectural power in deciding how my site is structured and navigated. I also have programmatic power in the sense that I can use code to influence user interaction. However, I lack full gatekeeping power because larger platforms and search engines control visibility. This reminds me that while I can shape the design of my work, I also depend on external networks to reach an audience.