[Geowanking] Location encodings, URL schemes

[Andy Armstrong]

On 18 Feb 2005, at 15:08, Bill Kearney wrote:
>> Interesting... would there be some sort of a default behavior? Seems
>> like big infoportals like google and mapquest would be *very*
>> interested in somthing like this.
>
> Only if it pointed toward their own services.  Being able to take one 
> set of
> search results and pop over to some other service is doesn't seem like
> something they'd be interested in supported.

I thought that's what Google did? They've got quite a big collection of 
links to other people's services :)

>   Whether or not it'd be good
> for the user or not.  That and a link to a point is worthless if there 
> is
> other data that would likewise need to be present.  "Need" being highly
> dependent on whose side of the situation you're considering.  For the
> service there are doubtless other data they'd want on that map 
> (presumably
> driven by advertising revenue...)
>
> What might be more useful would be extending the href tag with markup.
>
> <a href="/html/link/to/something" geo:point="some;geo;data;">here</a>
>
> This would allow for anything client-side that was aware of the 
> namespace
> and attributes to pay attention to it without distrupting things for 
> tools
> that don't.  Ihe case of route planning software, for example, it 
> would have
> the ability to perhaps intercept the right-click context menu when geo
> markup was present.  Or perform page-level scanning for a toolbar, 
> sidebar
> or other action.

Yes, that might be cool but it's a different thing I think. For these 
purposes I'm really just interested in what follows from having a URL 
scheme that uniquely describes locations on the planet - so that each 
location has a single, canonical URL. I'd be interested in extending 
the syntax to support regions and other metadata but, for me at least, 
the attractive thing is the semantics of a URL that doesn't link off to 
some other site - it links directly (whatever that ends up meaning) to 
a location on the planet. I like the idea of being able to say "this is 
the address of this physical location - make of that what you will" 
rather than "here's a link to a site that has some stuff about this 
location"

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net