The web was designed to be a document-sharing system. As a result, much of the data it contains is text-based, and has limited provisions for machine-readable, structured data that can be easily organized for humans at scale. The notable exception is extensible markup language (XML), which is primarily used by developers for business purposes.

The pioneers of the web have tried to provide an element of structure beyond freeform documents with the semantic web, which adds common data attributes and exchange protocols within the web page constructs.
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