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Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

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Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#81

Post by mmahemoff »

icebraining wrote: post #65
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 If it's a local place with a website, the information is probably outdated anyway becaus…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.

There are many RFCs by the Internet Engineering Task Force which go beyond this definition.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#82

Post by aw3c2 »

Terretta wrote: post #49

hostname.com/business.txt is wrong. You are supposed to use the /.well-known/ subfolder. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785 If you plan to implement a "standard" please try to review the RFCs that have covered this ground before. There's probably already a standard which may fit. If not, there's probably one that's close you could propose a change to. And if you're trying something genuinely new, you'll at least be o…

Interesting RFC. Do you know of any implementations of it?

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#83

Post by e1ven »

simonbrown wrote: post #75
icebraining wrote: post #36

Now we need a reviews.txt so that we don't need to give control of the reviews to less than trustworthy parties. I propose: [company/product name] (URL) score: X/Y [review text] -- [next review...] E.g.: Frank's Pizza Place (http://franks.geocities.com) score: 8/10 Good service and food. Doesn't accept credit cards.

You want to trust the businesses being reviewed instead? This also wouldn't stop these sites choosing which reviews to show. The best solution is to find a site you trust.

I think he's suggesting you would host this on your personal domain, reviewing other services. Yelp/etc would then act as an aggregation of these reviews, rather than the hosting company for them.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#84

Post by fusiongyro »

alttab wrote: post #43
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.

What world do you live in where XML is easier? Have you ever written a SAX parser? XML parsing is not "easier". Screw the libraries that "do it for you". You still have to understand the tiered data structure, attributes vs content, namespaces,.... the list goes on. Understanding the schema and all that jazz is WAY more difficult than key: value. edit: Parsing is just as easy. Here is a one-liner in ruby: business_da…

How does your parser handle malformed entries? How do you handle text encoding? What are the valid attributes, what constitutes valid text?

XML is unsexy, but it's only complex because it addresses these issues up front. A clever one-liner doesn't make these issues go away, it just postpones them to an inopportune time later.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#86

Post by alttab »

fusiongyro wrote: post #84
alttab wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What world do you live in where XML is easier? Have you ever written a SAX parser? XML parsing is not "easier". Screw the libraries that "do it for you". You still have to understand the tiered data structure, attributes vs content, namespaces,.... the list goes on. Understanding the schema and all that jazz is WAY more difficult than key: value. edit: Parsing is just as easy. Here is a one-liner in ruby: business_da…

How does your parser handle malformed entries? How do you handle text encoding? What are the valid attributes, what constitutes valid text? XML is unsexy, but it's only complex because it addresses these issues up front. A clever one-liner doesn't make these issues go away, it just postpones them to an inopportune time later.

I see your point.

The original post doesn't address these issues, and I'm not sure it is ever designed to. If someone wanted to create a globally accessed, multi-language, all-encoding supported fully validated business information XML-RPC protocol they certainly wouldn't have arrived at "business.txt".

The main problem it was trying to solve is to prevent business owners from having to update their information everywhere it ends up - not to ensure proper encoding (99% of applications would be happy with UTF-8) and formatting. In almost all use cases simply copying what was there and plopping it into a string would be fine.

Which brings me back to my point about XML. A lot of the time, XML produces complexity that simply isn't necessary. Following the 80/20 rule, designing it for your specific use case will be multitudes faster and work fine for your target audience, no need to build an enterprise system and standard global protocol out of the gate.

Re: Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

#88

Post by icebraining »

e1ven wrote: post #83
simonbrown wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to trust the businesses being reviewed instead? This also wouldn't stop these sites choosing which reviews to show. The best solution is to find a site you trust.

I think he's suggesting you would host this on your personal domain, reviewing other services. Yelp/etc would then act as an aggregation of these reviews, rather than the hosting company for them.

Yes, that's it, though it probably shouldn't require a particular position in the URL, so that you could e.g. put it on Dropbox, make it public and link it from somewhere.

As long as it was called reviews.txt and had that particular format, it'd be valid.

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