Use case: URI scheme to access map data

Maps4HTML / HTML-Map-Element-UseCases-Requirements

Use cases and requirements for Maps on the Web

https://maps4html.org/HTML-Map-Element-UseCases-Requirements/

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Use case: URI scheme to access map data #173

Open Malvoz opened 4 years ago

Malvoz commented 4 years ago

RFC 5870 defines the geo URI scheme.

Such a URI could potentially have multiple use cases in the context of a map viewer (perhaps depending on resolution in https://github.com/Maps4HTML/HTML-Map-Element-UseCases-Requirements/issues/8), apart from the use cases mentioned in the RFC:

Allow browsers to display a stand-alone map viewer in a tab when the user navigates to the URI.
Capability: Define a data source for a tile layer.
etc.

Malvoz commented 4 years ago

FWIW, browsers don't do much with geo links today. E.g. clicking the example link

<a href="geo:37.786971,-122.399677">View location</a>

in Chrome does nothing. Firefox prompts the user with the message: "The address wasn’t understood". Edge handles this better and recognizes the user is in need of an application capable of handling the request, and provides the user with the option to go to Microsoft Store.

While geo URIs may have its use cases in the context of web maps, I believe the implementation of native web maps may instead be a motivator for the UA to support geo URIs.

prushforth commented 4 years ago

What I was thinking of specifically, was that the URI scheme "tile" could contain a URL template in which the template variable names were defined by the registration, which would be tied to the MapML spec, which defines what the semantics of tile coordinate systems are. It would be a shortcut to a tile layer, such as is used by Leaflet and OpenLayers, and probably other libs, but without really defining tile semantics (because they dont have to, they themselves are the only Ines who need to understand their own semantics).