Hacker News Reader

Comment by tommoor | Hacker News Reader

I think this usecase is already covered very well by microformats and the various metadata standards that already exist and are supported by Google, Facebook et al.

I'm not sure the argument that these are too complicated for non-developers really works here, after all uploading a file to the root of a web directory is likely also too complicated...

View on HN

Not to mention that the text file is invisible to the business owner, who inevitably would forget about it.

Apart from the really complicated thing for non-developers, another thing I don't like from schema is that it seems to targeted to websites like Yelp or Foursquare; but not too the original local business website.

The owner of the local business is the one who knows which is the correct address, phone, opening hours, menu, etc. All the other websites (yelp, foursquare, google places) can be wrong. We just need the local business to tell the rest of the world which is the correct data.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here, micro-formats are part of the HTML of the local businesses website, search engines and other crawlers can collect and parse this data . This is just like the local business owner telling the rest of the world which is the correct data.

If updating the HTML is too complicated for the website owner (fair enough!) then this should be taken care of in the respective CMS.

I don't mean to sound negative, I know It takes some thought and time to put out a proposal like this :-) Just in this case, this seems to be a problem that was solved a long time ago...

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

go to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438320

Reply on news.ycombinator.com