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
Doesn’t work on the moon.
Neat, works well for me on Boost / Android
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
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.
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
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 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
Very cool, this was the result for me, so at least on android it seems to work as advertised.
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.
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
This is neat
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?
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
For me, there is no link. I copied it and pasted it (geo:49.30063, -123.13149) several different things and none of them worked correctly.
Which app/frontend are you using? It looks like some of the Lemmy/Piefed clients don’t support it properly.
I don’t see how which app on Lemmy would matter as far as geo-coordinates because all you’re linking there is literally a latitude and longitude of coordinates. And if they paste it into a web browser, it wouldn’t matter what lemmy client they use.
Frontend apps need to recognize the markdown as a valid url scheme and parse it accordingly
Voyager does not, for example
Some apps display/handle links in weird ways. It’s the same reason why the OSM link above lists information about support on different messaging apps. I assume some of it comes down to sanitizing inputs, or whether a specific library an app is using has support for it, or if an app offloads the task to the system share sheet
For example, the links work for me in Boost for Lemmy and Summit, but not in Voyager. Another user mentioned submitting an issue to the developer of their particular app
You have a space after the comma which is ruining the formatting. Try it without.
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.
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.
This is only true if you don’t have an app installed to handle the link schema. When I click the link, it opens Organic Maps
