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Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

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Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#61

Post by fesja »

RKearney wrote: post #55
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.

I don't know what's the correct word for this, and even if it will arrive somewhere.

The only thing I know is that there is a problem local businesses and website providers have. And there isn't an efficient solution yet. I've propose a solution so we can discuss it and see if it makes sense. That's where we are now.

About going international, I'm from Spain, so of course I will be the first one interested in having an international "standard". People are already giving suggestions in github!

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#62

Post by engtech »

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.

YAML is the easiest combination of human and machine readable that has been implemented (so far).

http://yaml.org/

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#63

Post by tomkin »

This – in some form – is probably a good idea. Recently, I've worked on a few Business Improvement Area projects and one of the hassels for BIAs is keeping up-to-date information for each business (i.e., hours of operation, services, description, etc). So, this type of implementation would be great.

I think what I really get from this is that each business needs some form of public API.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#64

Post by DannyBee »

fesja wrote: post #56

Does anyone have the contact of people in "Data harmonization" team of Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, etc? Could you share this idea with them to see if we can discuss it further? my email is javier at touristeye.com

Google already supports the schema.org formats for this exact info. (e.g. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... and surrounding info)

Please don't take this the wrong way, since I think it's great that you are thinking about these problems, but :

It's not clear what advantage your format offers. On the other hand, it has some pretty clear disadvantages, including generating massive amounts of possibly useless web traffic, not just on the server side, but on the crawling side, since now getting business info takes two requests, instead of one (when it is embedded in a schema.org format on the page).

Additionally, without some tag that tells you whether business.txt would exist, you get to check for every website. This will slow down crawlers.

Given at least most of the companies on the crawling side of this want to support/support the schema.org markup version, ISTM you would be better off spending your time making simple generators for it or adding support for it to wordpress/et al.

FWIW: I have no comment on whether text formats are better than schema.org or anything like that, but to a large degree, it's irrelevant, because getting a large number of folks to support something they believe is already a solved problem is very very difficult.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#65

Post by icebraining »

delinka wrote: post #48

"Without business.txt he would have to go to all the websites like Yelp and Foursquare and..." No. No no no. This is not how the Internet is supposed to work. I search for a restaurant online hoping they have a website with this information on it. If it's a chain, I can find the local location and know the information is correct. If it's a local place with a website, the information is probably outdated anyway becaus…

The only way the Internet is supposed to work is by routing packages to the machines with the right IP address.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#66

Post by icebraining »

maayank wrote: post #58

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 Reso…

I'm an RDF kool-aid drinker, but removing friction for adding somewhat structured content is always OK for me. I'd rather have a standard way of converting from the business.txt format to RDF than not have the data at all.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#67

Post by cpach »

becomevocal wrote: post #46
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

Second. A meta-tag would make it easier for services to add in mass as well.

With a meta tag the data could even be hosted by a third-party service if the site owner prefers that.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#68

Post by icebraining »

dantheta wrote: post #39
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.

XML also has the advantage of declaring the character set of the content.

I would say that nowadays there was no reason not to use UTF-8, but then I found out that Notepad still saves using ANSI as the format encoding. Damn you, Microsoft!

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#69

Post by cpach »

novaleaf wrote: post #57
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)

But robots.txt is just for exclusion directives, right? AFAICT it's not really used for assistance with finding resources.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#70

Post by tg3 »

cpach wrote: post #69
novaleaf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But robots.txt is just for exclusion directives, right? AFAICT it's not really used for assistance with finding resources.

That's true, but you can also specify the Sitemap from the robots.txt, which is an inclusion standard.
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