[Geowanking] Location encodings, URL schemes

[Andy Armstrong]

On 18 Feb 2005, at 22:22, Gary Peck wrote:
> A Uniform Resource *Locator* tells you where to find a resource (i.e.
> using this protocol at this server address, requesting this resource),
> whereas a Uniform Resource *Identifier* just uniquely identifies a
> resource without specifying how to retrieve it. Since your geo: scheme
> just identifies a geographic location and leaves it up to the user to
> specify what to do with that location (e.g. open maps.google.com with
> the location as a search string), it's actually a URI, not a URL.

Thanks for the distinction Gary - it is indeed a URI.

> Either way, I think the idea is great. You could even have a 
> specialized
> client/plugin that handled the URI by combining data from multiple
> sources and displaying a nice summary (e.g. a map from maps.google.com,
> weather data from weather.com, the nearest airport, news headlines for
> the nearest major city, etc.).

Yup :)

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net