Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#21

Post by fesja » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

oleganza wrote: post #16

Great idea. Added one for our company. It took just a couple of minutes. http://pierlis.com/business.txt

added to the README file of companies supporting it!

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#22

Post by unwind » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:47 AM UTC

oleganza wrote: post #16

Great idea. Added one for our company. It took just a couple of minutes. http://pierlis.com/business.txt

My browser is failing to render the address properly, it reads as "PoissonniÃ¨re" so the diaresis is breaking. Probably need to double-check how you serve the file, and make sure the charset and encoding match.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#23

Post by fesja » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:48 AM UTC

0ptr wrote: post #12

Is it missing fields for e-mail and logo? Or have you specified this actually somewhere (i.e. not just examples?) I think this is great idea, however Google has something like this already (microformats based) http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/ maybe adopting this would be easier?

about the fields, check out the docs https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/blob/master/structure.m...

about rich snippets, go to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438320

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#24

Post by TylerBrock » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:48 AM UTC

What about business.json instead?

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#25

Post by m_eiman » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:52 AM UTC

Regardless of the format of the content, I think that it'd be nice if files like this would be placed in /.well-known/[standard] in accordance with http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785

There are already too many magical files cluttering up the root.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#26

Post by pilif » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:54 AM UTC

So more senseless errors in my error log and more traffic caused by robots requesting a file that doesn't exist?

While I applaud the idea, can we please, please have a meta-tag or header that points to the location of this file if it's available?

We don't need another favicon.ico nor robots.txt

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#27

Post by Zarkonnen » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 11:55 AM UTC

I like the idea a lot, but as it stands the format is pretty US-centric. I've written up some suggestions on how to fix this at https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/issues/2

The core problem is definitely that many small business sites, especially restaurant ones, are really terrible outdated, and really not run by someone who would understand the concept of "upload text file to server".

So perversely, storing the information centrally would be easier, but who would you trust with it? The temptation to create a walled garden and "monetize" all that juicy local business data would be very strong for the maintainers. And then everything falls apart into small localized non-interoperating fiefdoms again, and we're back where we started...