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
Sadly it doesn’t work sharing a geo link in Signal, and they don’t want to implement it. GitHub Issue
Gotta marvel at the logic at work. No one supports it, neither should we. Great way to ensure nothing ever happens.
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.
The link does not even render in Voyager, unfortunately.
Yeah I noticed that was well
That’s exactly why YSK (especially if you’re a developer)!
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.
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 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
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.
Well yeah, it’s lunography, lunology and lunometry
That’s just lunacy
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.)
That seems to work.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
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
Very cool, this was the result for me, so at least on android it seems to work as advertised.
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.
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.
You have a space after the comma which is ruining the formatting. Try it without.
Which app/frontend are you using? It looks like some of the Lemmy/Piefed clients don’t support it properly.
Voyager
FYI Works with Summit
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
Could be just my configuration, but does not work in Brave, does not work in Safari, DOES work in Orion.
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
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.
