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Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

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Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#51

Post by andos »

facorreia wrote: post #40

The schema is rather US-centric. For instance, many countries don't have "states". They may have other divisions, in the 0..N level range, with other names. It would be better to research and use a current, established format for international addresses.

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses [1][2] is long-overdue. “There is a current, established format for international addresses” is probably one of them.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

[2] http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#54

Post by gav »

fesja wrote: post #6
Avalaxy wrote: post #3

Wouldn't it be easier if this were XML instead of plain text? I assume the goal is that software can easily interpret the data.

We want to be a human friendly file. If we had a JSON or XML file, it would be too complicated for a non-developer to write or read it. On this way, I think it doesn't matter if the website is done in wordpress, drupla, static files, flash, etc. It's just a simple file. Also, we are following the same pattern as the robots.txt file.

The main issue I see with this philosophy is that you are pushing the responsibility for understanding the format upstream, similar to all the problems people used to have with malformed RSS feeds.

If you want to have a feed of some kind that is machine-readable then you need to have a spec that is unambiguous. Using JSON or XML helps. Having a clear understanding of what could be in each field, including currencies, timezones, etc, is required.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#55

Post by RKearney »

robotman42 wrote: post #13

Why do business people try to push business standards as technical solutions? That's not what standards are for, they are for technical problems. It looks like DRM to me: a technical solution to a social problem or a broken business model. TL;DR: there are existing solutions, micro-formats for example.

But then how will fesja be able to tell everyone "Hey, I created a web standard! /flex"

You're right. No research was done. Author just threw information that he thought was important into a text file and called it a day. RFC 5785 says to put the file into the .well-known folder, the author only thought about United States addresses when making this, and as you stated the problem has already been addressed.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#57

Post by novaleaf »

pilif wrote: post #26

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

what about meta entry(s) in the robots.txt, specifying if additional things like business.txt exist (and where)

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#58

Post by maayank »

I like this idea very much and its simplicity, but it seems inevitable to me that going down this path will just recreate RDF[0] and RDF Schema. A sort of a semantic web version of Greenspun's tenth rule[1].

For those of you who want to quickly get up to speed on RDF/Schema, "A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers"[2] was to me a very good introduction.

[0] From the W3C primer on RDF: "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule

[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODSD/

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#59

Post by caseysoftware »

buro9 wrote: post #15

The idea of a text file at the root isn't a bad one, but the format of the document should be far more descriptive. Have you looked at http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html and the examples there? Everything in the example given is encapsulated by schema.org and that would describe it in a way that was unambiguous. I know that schema.org has been dismissed because "The problem is that it's too complicated for a non-dev…

I'm wondering why hCard isn't in play: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

They even provide an example for an organization here: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#Parsing_Details

It looks like by default, it only intends to have one url but adding more should be as simple as adding a rel type to give some context around it.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#60

Post by pilif »

quadhome wrote: post #50
pilif wrote: post #26

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

You'd rather a robot hit your frontpage— and by association, your application- than hit your 404 static page? Instead of generating errors from 404s (a lot of noise), try generating errors from the same repeated 404s.

The robot will very likely hit my frontpage anyways, so I'd rather have them look (and not find) for a meta tag there than to produce an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth.

Besides, my frontpage is either heavily fragment- or just page-cached anyways - especially for anonymous user - so it can be served directly from RAM for all intents and purposes, so a hit to the frontpage is really, really cheap.

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