Making Meaning on the Web

Every web page is written for people. This short guide is about a small, friendly idea: a page can also carry meaning that computers understand, using a web standard called RDFa. Everything you see below is editable — just click in and start typing.

Written by Ada Lovelace, published 7 July 2026. The coloured outlines mark the facts a computer can read.

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) is often called the world's first computer programmer — a fitting guide to a language that machines can read.

What is a fact?

At its heart, a fact is just three parts joined together: something, a relationship, and a value. Once you see facts this way, almost anything can be written down clearly — for a reader and for a machine alike.

A diagram splitting a fact into three parts: Subject, Predicate and Object.
A single fact, split into its three parts.

Here is that same fact written out in plain words:

Subject     This guide
Predicate   was written by
Object      Ada Lovelace

The table below turns a few everyday sentences into these same three parts.

Everyday sentences, seen as data
Sentence Who or what Relationship Value
This guide explains RDFa. This guide explains RDFa
Ada Lovelace wrote it. Ada Lovelace wrote this guide
It was published in 2026. This guide published in 2026

One page, two readers

The magic of RDFa is that a single page can serve two audiences at once. A person sees friendly words and pictures; a computer sees the very same page and understands the meaning tucked inside it — with no separate file required.

A page in the middle, read by a person on one side and a computer on the other.
One page can be understood by people and machines together.
When pages share their meaning, the whole web starts to feel like one big, answerable library.

Why it matters

When machines understand pages, everyday things simply work better:

Try it yourself

This whole page is a live editor. Here are a few things to try right now:

  1. Type a sentence, then press Enter to start a new block.
  2. Select a few words, then right-click to tag them with meaning.
  3. Use the toolbar to add a heading, list, image or table.
  4. Hover a block and drag the ⠿ handle to reorder it.

Learn more

Curious to go further? The RDFa Primer is a gentle introduction, schema.org offers ready-made vocabularies for common things, and the World Wide Web Consortium maintains the standards that hold it all together. This guide is shared by the open web community.