Hi Cédric,

This sounds like a pretty interesting idea. You may find that there are a bunch of other people who also want to work with you on a microformat for menus.

I encourage you to join the microformats-discuss mailing list:

http://microformats.org/discuss

And ask there. You can often find folks on the IRC channel as well: #microformats on irc.freenode.net.

Thanks,

Tantek

There will be several problems with that:
Restaurants do not take the time to publish their menus on the internet. They should have a tool, where they don't need to do it twice (one time for in the restaurant itself and second for the internet).
Next problem: technology. A lot of restaurants still don't have an internet connection and if they have, they don't know (yet) what a blog is. This will still take a lot of time, unless there is a really simple tool out there which spares time to the restaurants.
Good idea, though. Try it out.

@tantek

thx - will present a draft spec as base for a community discussion

@denis

fair enough - technology adoption in the hotel and restaurant industry is rather slow - and structured blogging is still in it's early stage. I see this effort more as a long-term investment (2-4 years) - providing intermediate steps will certainly help raising awareness and using a none-lock-in model hopefully provides additional incentive.

I think there is somehow a problem because lot of restaurants are not able even to mail the menus. But your right perhaps in some years every thing will be different.

A lot of restaurants still telefax there menus to the companys (perhaps orc from telefax would be great ;) and some but the menu to there own website. For our mensa menu we wrote a little tool to parse the information.

But there allready some websites out there (can't rember there names) which try to get information about menus from many restaurants as possible (input with simple webform). Perhaps they will syndicate this information and somebody will connect this information to a location based service.

I think this is a great idea - I'd like to see this integrated into Yellowikis.

hi Cedric

This looks like a great idea, however its not the technology which is a factor but the limitation of time that restaurants will have to do this kind of work. Normally they would be really busy with running the business. However I like to see if you have further developed this idea since my self and Ross is looking at implementing this in MenuTree and it would be good to look at using a standard Microformat (I am new to this area but like the sound of this).

Check it out at http://www.menutree.net if you haven't already don so...

cheers
Binusha

Hello Cedric,

Great!
Is hMenucard developed already?
Where is possible to read more about it?

@Anonymous

Thanks for asking. I did not pursue this idea further.