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
Could be just my configuration, but does not work in Brave, does not work in Safari, DOES work in Orion.
Doesn’t do anything as far as I can tell? Or is this android specific?
Also the links don’t work in discord.
It’s what’s known as a “Protocol URI”, which the OS and/or browser have to choose what to do with that
Sounds like you have an OS or Browser that haven’t implemented the protocol
not only that. some clients including voyager don’t recognize geo uris as openable links
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
Doesn’t work on the moon.
Technically it does.
The default is to use the Coordinate Reference System for the Earth, but if you wanted to use the moon then you’d use something like,
Nice !
Geo means earth. Of course it won’t work outside of the Earth
Ah, my mistake, there is no geography, geology, or geometry on the moon.
People who named them like so didn’t think that there would be geometry, geology or geography on the moon. Or they just interpreted it as land.
Well, most places people go to are outside the earth. (Just barely outside.)
Does anyone know, why GitHub of all places does not support geo links in their readme or issue markdown files?
Edit: oops replied to the wrong person
Mailto is explicitly allowed in the sanitizer they use, other such uri schemes aren’t.
This is relatively standard, likely due to the mixed support.
Geo is not well supported, and ones like sms are platform-dependent.
It’s just a pain noone wants to deal with.
Neat, works well for me on Boost / Android
I opened this in CoMaps and now i have a permanent map pointer to it hah
Permanent sea otters? I’d count that as a win.
Oops 😄
I think if you clear the cache it might go away. Mine doesn’t show it anymore
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.
For me it fails when I do that.
FYI does using Summit
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.
I mean, that’s kind of on purpose with W3W.
A slight error should make the recipient go “Wait, what? That’s in Venezuela!” rather than sending an ambulance crew to a location like 20 miles away from you.
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
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
This is neat
I wonder if it would make sense to have a URL scheme for that instead, like
geo://49.30063,-123.13149What about tel:, or mailto:, sms:, callto:
I’m trying to say “great job pointing that out” without soundling like an LLM. But seriously, I’m happy you pointed that out. I completely forgot about those syntaxes. After you mentioned them, I went and browsed RFC3986 and found these sample URIs, which include news, mailto, ftp, and more, which covers both // style and non-// style. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986/#section-1.1.2
It’s too late for me to claim that I fully grok the nuances, so that’ll have to wait for anther day, but I appreciate your comment. TIL some cool stuff.
It’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.
Sadly it doesn’t work sharing a geo link in Signal, and they don’t want to implement it. GitHub Issue
Same with element. They used to support it but dropped it. Really stupid excuse in that github issue. If adding support for sonething so simple adds lots of complexity then your codebase is garbage. This is why we cant have nice things.
Lol the pr is only 2 files, one of which is a test class. I do wonder why they wrote their own parser, does javas url handler not support the geo scheme either or something?
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)!
The link does not even render in Voyager, unfortunately.
Yeah I noticed that was well
Very cool, this was the result for me, so at least on android it seems to work as advertised.
