Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

Is there any effort to define a customer-facing standard for information like this?

    /.well-known/location_list
    /.well-known/location/<code>/open_hours
    /.well-known/location/<code>/phone
    /.well-known/location/<code>/<other_metadata>

etc? Or even on-page microformats. Google used to do this until they got big enough that they didn't have to anymore. This would probably be the only way we could chip away at that moat, and ensure we don't fall into that trap again.

View on HN

There is one: https://schema.org/

It's honored by Google (it can enhance your search visibility) and that's why it's slowly getting popular. Far from wide adoption, though.

Yes. It was called the semantic web, but it never took off.

The semantic web failed due to HTML being a format for humans. Where humans need to enter for them unnecessary extra data so the machines could understand what the humans already understood. There should be a (URL maybe?) scheme for machines generated by machines with standard properties like open hours, site category, etc.

There's still some attempt being made, for example with json-ld[1].

Ultimately any kind of microdata has the same problems that OpenGraph or ye olde meta keywords etc. tags did, GOOG and Co. need to parse the human-readable content to confirm any extra data for bots is not a trick. Which tends to encourage them to just ignore it, at best it's a slightly more structured version of what they're scraping from the page, at worst it's a lie.

1: https://json-ld.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com