For each example in this post, I will be linking to the sea otter pools at the Vancouver aquarium. That location has the coordinates of 49.30063,-123.13149
To link to it, you would use ‘geo:49.30063,-123.13149’.
Depending on your web browser, pasting that into the search bar might prompt you to select which map website you want to use to view that location. For me in Firefox, it asked me to pick between Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps. It’s even more convenient on mobile, where it asks me which map app I want to open it with. Both CoMaps and Google Maps handled it correctly.
If you are writing a post or comment on Lemmy/Piefed/etc., you can place it in the second part of the markdown link format: [Sea Otter Pools](geo:49.30063,-123.13149). This would output like this: Sea Otter Pools
The linked OpenStreetMap wiki page has a good summary of how well various apps support this scheme. A lot of people here are active in the open source space, so please consider following up with the apps that are currently missing support or have partial support for this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme
EDIT: I forgot to mention, you can also use apps like this one to convert maps links between each other
https://github.com/jakubvalenta/GeoShare
https://f-droid.org/packages/page.ooooo.geoshare/
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/page.ooooo.geoshare
This is neat
I will be linking to the sea otter pools at the Vancouver aquarium
checks username
Party at your place?
You don’t need to bring clams, but it’s polite to do so
BYOOR
Bring Your Oyster Opening Rock
It has abysmal support. All the places you’d need it to work without anything special, like link recognition in messaging apps and email clients, it rarely does. Even apps that could make good use of specific locations for inputs often don’t register a handler for the scheme. It’s been that way for years, and I don’t expect it to get a whole lot better.
Pro tip: on Android, the Automate app can receive text shared to it and do custom things — such as getting coordinates, slapping ‘geo:’ on them, and opening in a map app. This can alleviate some of the pains by the user selecting and sharing the coords by hand. The app is paid and requires some programming chops, but is hella useful for custom automation.
That’s exactly why YSK (especially if you’re a developer)!
Lemme see test link
I guess yours isn’t working because there’s a space in it
Ooh okay, I expected it to ignore the space, nice!
Yep, works with the default lemmy frontend and Waterfox then
The link just does nothing for me on jerboa
For me it does work when I hold press the link and then choose “Open in external” in the popup that opens. But yes, simply tapping does nothing.
FYI does using Summit
I wonder if it would make sense to have a URL scheme for that instead, like
geo://49.30063,-123.13149It’s hard not to immediately want to extend this to astronomy
maybe
geo:earth.surface/lat,lon?date=dateorgeo:mars.sky?lat=lat,lon=lon,date=dateor something? I’m sure there could be a stanard syntax for but I’m pretty ignorant about how that could work well.
This sounds nice. On iphone, nothing happens when I click your link. When I paste it in safari, it searches for it, and the ddg results are coordinates finder websites, not related to the specific location.
I opened this in CoMaps and now i have a permanent map pointer to it hah
Oops 😄
I think if you clear the cache it might go away. Mine doesn’t show it anymore
Very cool, this was the result for me, so at least on android it seems to work as advertised.
That seems to work.Is this better than What Three Words which also has a URL scheme? And is more memorable.
The geo URL scheme works even for non English speakers and it won’t give you a location on the other side of the world if you lake a typo or pronounce it bad.
Since WhatThreeWords is proprietary, it likely won’t be as easy to get it implemented in everything. I think the difficulty with coordinates can be solved by having an easy way to copy the Geo URI from various map apps
Link doesn’t work in voyager. Does in Firefox though!
For me in Firefox it just takes me to my search engine, which proposes a bunch of sites to convert gps coordinates, top item is a front end for google maps. No OpenStreetMaps to be seen. Doesn’t look like it’s a universally supported thing. Also none of the position links in this thread are clickable
I’m on a phone, haven’t tried it on a PC yet
That’s probably what makes the difference
I zoomed in on bumfuck, Kansas to try this out. Let’s see.
Ah, neat. Works now.
You need the ! to start it off.
Edit: Not working
Edit 2, trying again:
Edit 3: no worky
Edit 4: Now it works as a link, thanks to the other posters, but it doesn’t really do anything. Maybe Ublock Origin?
It’s the whitespace
The exclamation mark is for images, yours isn’t working because of the space in the coordinates
I got the correct area on Fennec -> CoMaps (app) on /e/OS. ☺️ The website alone resulted in a blank page.
Depending on your web browser, pasting that into the search bar might prompt you to select which map website you want to use to view that location. For me in Firefox, it asked me to pick between Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps.
I’m on Firefox and all it did was initiate a web search that found one result: this thread. If it’s a hyperlink, all it does is open a blank page.
