As Semantic Web technology moves closer and closer to everyday reality, browser makers are busy adding tools to upcoming versions that will allow users to better utilize and explore the metadata they soon will be able to access.

Sean Michael Kerner over at internetnews.com explains how Mozilla is leading the way with its upcoming Firefox 3.0 browser, but that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) may not be far behind."

Both browsers are working to include some measure of support for microformats -- a simple means of categorizing Web content as metadata. ...

Microformats, defined by the technology's community site Microformats.org as "small bits of HTML that represent things like people, events, tags, etc. in Web pages," represent a lightweight means of bringing semantics to the Web. ...

Microsoft makes use of microformats by way of two technologies -- WebSlices and Activities -- that enable site developers to more easily pull in third-party content.

Though IE8 does have some semantic capabilities, it's unclear whether Microsoft currently considers IE a "Semantic Web browser."

Undoubtedly these changes will be slow and incremental, but unless something goes awry, the advent of the semantic web will make the Internet experience vastly different -- and better -- over the next decade as computers become increasingly able to analyze information on the web, no matter what format it's in. Or, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, put it way back in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Berners-Lee, by the way, will be a keynote speaker at Jupitermedia's LinkedDataPlanet conference running from June 17-18 in New York City. (Yes, that was a plug.)