Danielle Foré
danirabbit@mastodon.online
Two standard URIs we need in [current year]:
1. Music. I should be able to share a platform agnostic link to a song that your music service can match and open correctly
2. Maps. This one should be like especially straightforward. Why can’t I send you a link from Apple Maps that opens in Google Maps or Open Street Map or whatever.
Let’s go standards body people. I know y’all are on Fedi
Edit: hey maybe check replies before replying. A ton of people have already mentioned geo:// 🙂
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@danirabbit wait there isn't a map one? o.o I thought ... *checks* UGH the fucking "Default Maps App" thing from windows 10 was "BINGMAPS:" all along? UGH!!
Yes definitely 100000%
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@danirabbit I would love some kind of internet-based mimetypes 
I'm still convinced that a big issue with Fedi adoption is the lack of standard ActivityPub URIs for sharing links. It's gotta be confusing for people when you link to a post and it goes to the originating server instead of opening on your Fedi server of choice, or even maybe having your browser pull up a server-picker like system app picker does when you don't have a default set.
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sodiboo 
sodiboo@gaysex.cloud
@charlotte @danirabbit my first reaction to a “general map URI standard” is that like, this is extremely nontrivial unless your payload is just a single point in the world identified by GPS coordinates. and of course, this is already supported in geo:. but like, maps applications support linking to a particular business, to a particular address, to a particular region, and a variety of other things. this is all quite nontrivial to communicate in a URI. maps apps also generally support things like a location sharing link; this would likely not work cross-application, and i think it overall would make for a confusing user experience to inconsistently copy a “standard” link or a “proprietary” link depending on what you want to link to.
like, i’m not against having a richer maps URI, i would love that, but i disagree that “it’s especially straightforward” because map apps support so much more nuance than a point in the physical world, because the ways human specify places is extremely fuzzy and nearly impossible to unambiguously reference in all cases.
and almost the exact same thing goes for songs: there is no universal registry of all songs, and songs are not unambiguously or uniquely named. you can’t reference a song uniquely, in a uniform way. and unlike real world places, there is no convenient approximation that’s good enough in most cases and can be uniquely referenced; that approximation being GPS coordinates because “taking up space on earth” is close enough to a universal registry for that approximation to be actually useful in the real world.
still, i’m all for it. please, standards folks, figure out the fuzziness of human creativity and make a useful music link and maps link.
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Charlotte/Cinny 
charlotte
@sodiboo @danirabbit in particular you’d put in the address in the ?q= argument (and the only part that is supported on google maps)
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sodiboo
sodiboo@gaysex.cloud
@charlotte @danirabbit google maps has way richer links than just a query.
here’s a link to the transit map of Stockholm:
https://google.com/maps/@?api=1&map_action=map¢er=59.3,18.1&zoom=12&layer=transit
here’s a bicycle route from the pyramids of giza to the nile river, avoiding toll routes:
when not using their API with very nice readable parameters, just the URLs that are used by the app itself and shown to humans, then they consist of three parts:
- the human-readable slug (useless on its own, sometimes a valid link but not generally not)
- the map state (location & zoom)
- the auxiliary data on the sidebar; “which business should be associated with the pin”
here’s an example of a linking to a software company in Stockholm:
to link to just coordinates, the shortest way is to omit the other parts. here’s just off the coast of africa:
https://google.com/maps/@0,0,1m
Most places don’t support this syntax, but here’s a short way to refer to London:
https://google.com/maps/place/London/
and London, Ontario:
https://google.com/maps/place/London,+ON,+Canada/
and indeed, the query syntax you mentioned is the most versatile, as it supports more fuzzy searches than the “place” syntax:
https://www.google.com/maps/?q=LAX
the directions endpoint also supports “place IDs”: with a particular query or coordinate, you can also associate a unique ID in the Google Places database; which if found, will match a particular establishment or something like that, rather than trying to do a fuzzy search.
Google Maps doesn’t seem to have a documented “search near” API endpoint, but Apple Maps has such a thing. Here’s a link to pizza places in Berlin:
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@danirabbit geo: exists but im not sure of its adoption
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@craftxbox @danirabbit Looks like there is a nifty extension to open geo:// links in Firefox ... nice!
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@sodiboo and there's their #PlusCodes initiative: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
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Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 🕐 CET
shaedrich@mastodon.online@sodiboo @danirabbit @charlotte In the end, a lot of these are just "convenience features", not necessary for a "bare-minimum standard" that all providers and clients alike *could* and *would* implement.
– IDs are often times tied to a single provider's database, so probably no two providers could agree on using the other one's as point of reference. Also, if that provider goes out of business, the whole system stops to work. This system wouldn't federate well at all
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Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 🕐 CET
shaedrich@mastodon.online@sodiboo @danirabbit @charlotte referencing to a place *would* theoretically be possible, however, this, again, would need to some debate, as some would wish for this to be the official name in the native language (either encoded or a slug), while others would opt for the English name. Best one *can* probably do, is plain text search.
As with IDs, there would need to be a global identifier with a standard pattern to it which everyone, not just a single monopolistic company, can agree on
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