Re: Location URIs?

We should look into this as we start taking about civic or simplified  
civic addressing.   We do need a better name.  location means  
something different in the browser.  (e.g. the uri of the document).   
However, I thing that this is out of scope for the first version of  
geolocation.


On Jan 21, 2009, at 8:58 AM, Erik Wilde wrote:

>
> 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 17:08:13 UTC