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
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.