Re: Location URIs?

hello.

Richard Barnes wrote:
> Now that we've gotten over the FPWD debate, I wanted to float the idea
> of one more small field to add to the API - the ability to optionally
> represent location as a URI:
> interface <dfn id="geodetic-position">Position</dfn> {
> readonly attribute DOMString locationURI;
> };
> This field would allow a UA to provide location to a location recipient 
> in the form of a URI, which the site could then dereference (via XHR or 
> by passing it to a back-end system) in order to get the UA's location.

i am all up for that, and i think it would be good to consider 
alternative ways of specifying a location. a location URI is something 
that would nicely fit web architecture, and there already are some 
proposals for location-oriented URI schemes, in which case there would 
not even be a roundtrip.

the beauty of location URIs is that they keep the API open for 
extensions. on the other hand, implementations using the API have to 
deal with the fact that they might receive URIs and/or resources which 
they do not know. in terms of web architecture, for resources, this 
could be dealt with using content negotiation, for URIs, it is more 
difficult, and quite a while ago (before the geolocation API work 
started), there was a long discussion on the uri@w3c.org mailing list 
whether location URIs should be HTTP URIs or should have a URI scheme of 
their own. that discussion never came to a conclusion.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2007Dec/0080.html

on the other hand, i had proposed this wider scope of the API a while 
back, but there seemed to be the general agreement that the API should 
only be about coordinates, and not about any other location concepts. 
this was why i proposed to rename the API to "geoposition" and keep the 
more general "geolocation" name available for a generalized version of 
the API which would have a wider scope.

cheers,

erik wilde   tel:+1-510-6432253 - fax:+1-510-6425814
        dret@berkeley.edu  -  http://dret.net/netdret
        UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool)

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 2009 16:59:53 UTC