This is neat
post
Sadly it doesn't work sharing a geo link in Signal, and they don't want to implement it. GitHub Issue
I will be linking to the sea otter pools at the Vancouver aquarium
checks username
Party at your place?
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
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.
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
Very cool, this was the result for me, so at least on android it seems to work as advertised.

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 wonder if it would make sense to have a URL scheme for that instead, like geo://49.30063,-123.13149
What 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
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.
I zoomed in on bumfuck, Kansas to try this out. Let's see.
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?
An unnecessary complicated example where I use an image in the first part of the markdown notation:
[](geo:49.30063,-123.13149)
Which renders as:
Also, no, I do not live at this location. Not currently.
Also, no, I do not live at this location. Not currently.
You otter consider it though. Free food. Swim any time you want. That’s the life.
Also: Unfortunately, in Voyager, the geo link is rendered just as the link description and isn’t clickable. And on iOS, I tried Firefox Focus and Safari and both just took me to a web search for longitude and latitude. I really wish it worked because it’s a great feature.
On my Maps for Android, it only zooms to the Aquarium, there's no pointer for the Sea Otter Pools.
I got the correct area on Fennec -> CoMaps (app) on /e/OS. ☺️ The website alone resulted in a blank page.
Heh, on my iPhone it wants to open an NFC reading app for the sea otter geo: link
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
Does not seem to open via Thunder. Can confirm that copying and pasting it into CoMaps or Waterfox works great though.
I have submitted a feature request to Thunder.
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.
I opened this in CoMaps and now i have a permanent map pointer to it hah
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,
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, most places people go to are outside the earth. (Just barely outside.)
Could be just my configuration, but does not work in Brave, does not work in Safari, DOES work in Orion.
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
When I pasted mine into duck duck go it didn't work. I deleted Geo and typed location, and now it works
Edit: spelling
Can the commercial map apps spit out that format when sharing a location? I met up with a random person last week to buy a used item off of marketplace and they sent me an Apple maps pin of the exact apartment building they were in. I didn’t have apple maps installed.
There are apps that can translate links into different formats, I would recommend that for your use case:
https://github.com/jakubvalenta/GeoShare
https://f-droid.org/packages/page.ooooo.geoshare/
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/page.ooooo.geoshare
Does Goo*le maps support it? Because they usually don't give a flying fuck about anything that would make it possible to share data with open-source solutions.
Cool stuff, but don't use this for your business. You want actual links that will always work regardless of browser support for Geo. You want your customers to easily retrieve information so you gain their business.
That seems to work.
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