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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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-developer", but I would say that for a non-developer this file is also too complicated. Most non-developer small business owners can barely use FTP or use the Wordpress admin. These people don't have a robots.txt and won't create a business.txt

I would argue that making business.txt schema.org formatted and then to use a simple generator wizard to produce it would be more accessible to the small business owner than giving them a text file to edit.

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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.

I'm of the same mind that implementing a common interface for Schema.org would be very useful. In many cases, the business.txt file is duplicating information that should be on your site anyway.

My experience with small business clients is that they have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the web. They tend to know exactly what they want, and are usually right. But, they don't know how to translate that to their sites. Usually, it just takes a bit of guidance.

Creating a proper about page for a site that implements schema.org standards makes sense for both the developer and content creator.

I completely agree with you that an interface on Wordpress would be much easier to a business owner than editing directly the text file

Having said that I also believe that a txt file is way more easier than schema for the rest of people who can edit a file. That txt file is done in minutes, the schema file is done in hours :P

What i feel necessary are 2 things:

- Having a separate file

- Doing something that the big websites support so we can "sell" to local businesses.

So if more people believe we should extend schema instead of going with txt, we can work on it.

That format is perfectly valid YAML, easily parsed, and just as easily created. It needn't be any more complicated than it is. I could make a WP plugin to support it within a few hours.

let's work on that WP plugin dan! ping me if you want

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