Geographic hyperlinks

[matthewslyman]

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: ... oordinates

http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack. ... ty(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 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.

[matthewslyman]

Reply via mailing list: there's already an RFC for this. It's in the works as of 2010... From Tantek Çelik:
See RFC 5870[1] for a proposed standard geo URI scheme for "geo:" hyperlinks. - Tantek
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870