[whatwg] Why type="location" was removed

[Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen]

On 10 Jun 2004 at 15:46, Ian Hickson wrote:

> 
> Some of you may have noticed that type="location" was removed between the
> last version that I published on my personal site, and the draft currently
> hosted by whatwg.org.

Would be a pity to loose it. It would be excellent if, say, tcl.fr 
asked me only once for my home address, set a cookie in my mobile 
phone's browser to remember it and later on I could just go to a page 
with a type="location" field and choose "show me the best route home" 
to see schedules and connections from the nearest bus/metro/tramway 
stop. :-)

> I have attached the comments that led to this removal. I am not qualified
> to write new text to address these concerns, but if someone can write text
> that solves these problems, I would be happy to reintroduce the feature.

I'm not qualified to write a text either but it may be worth 
considering that the site will normally have an idea of the required 
precision of the data. TCL's site (Lyon public transport) would 
benefit from a more precise location data than SNCF's (the French 
railways) as there are more bus stops than railway stations, and 
weather.com would usually only need to know what section of what 
country I'm in.

Obviously implementing a "Select from map" widget means the UA must 
be configured to find map data somewhere, and there must be a way to 
translate the coordinates of a user click (or whatever) back to 
coordinates. Precision for selecting from a map depends on the scale 
the map is using. Perhaps a "mapscale" attribute would be useful to 
let the site suggest a certain precision, and UAs that implement map-
selection could have zoom widgets to let the user override that.
-- 
Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen
hallvors at online.no / www.hallvord.com