frederickjansen
commented
6 years ago Hi @Tristramg
Are you certain that mapbox/polyline uses (lon, lat)? The example on their repo uses [38.5, -120.2], which can only be (lat, lon), since the range for lat has to be -90 to 90. They also specifically mention returns an array of lat, lon pairs.
I have no personal conviction that subscribes to either format, but there are two reasons why I would not advocate for changing the order:
- It would be a breaking release for everyone who has already installed polyline.
- The library and algorithm this is based on subscribe to (lat, lon). Anyone looking up information about Google Polyline will see latitude comes before longitude, in every example (e.g. here, here, here, and here). It would be confusing if only this polyline implementation switches the order.
I definitely agree that it's annoying that not everyone follows the same standard, and I should make the order more clear in the documentation of this library. However, I don't think that changing the code is a good idea.
Tristramg
I know it is heated question, and I usually wouldn’t want to impose my point of view.
However, currently, a string is decoded as [(lat, lon)…] while it is (lon, lat) (aka x,y on a planar map) on https://github.com/mapbox/polyline that inspired this library.
This makes it a bit cumbersome to use geojson as it also expects coordinates in the (x,y) order.
I don’t mind fixing it and making a pull request. However, I want to be sure that the original author agrees with that view.