[whatwg] Geographic hyperlinks

Tantek Çelik tantek at cs.stanford.edu
Mon Oct 10 07:37:21 PDT 2011


See RFC 5870[1] for a proposed standard geo URI scheme for "geo:"
hyperlinks. - Tantek
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 10:27, Matthew Slyman <whatwg at aaabit.com> wrote:
> http://forums.whatwg.org/bb3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4725
> [Topic has been on forum for 2 weeks without reply. Now posting to mailing
> list.]
> --
>
> Hyperlinks for geographic coordinates are a mess. Designers of web
> applications are being forced to design their own solutions to make
> geographic links more user-friendly...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates
>
> http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=London&params=51_30_26_N_0_7_39_W_type:city(7825200)_region:GB
>
> There's a relatively simple solution to all of this that could easily be
> upgraded over time. We already have "mailto:" hyperlinks, for example, that
> accept certain fields and map those to certain parameters within a
> user-definable (or system-specific) mail client application.
>
> The same could be done for geographic data. The user might install certain
> geographic information systems on their viewing device, specify their
> favourite for "geo:" links, and then when they follow a hyperlink with
> geographic content, any relevant information fields present might be
> transferred over to the geographic information system (GIS) as coordinates.
>
> I suggest for the HTML standards people to simply talk to Wikipedia or
> Google and copy their system, as a starting-point for discussion at least.
> Maybe their format could be tidied up slightly, but generally I think
> they've done a good job and that their work should be adopted as a standard,
> so that you don't end up seeing pages with dozens of hyperlinks (one for
> each GIS) as we do on Wikipedia.
>
> --
> Matthew Slyman, M.A. Computer Science (Camb)
>
>
>
>



-- 
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