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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

It's of course about lock-in. In the early Web-GIS era there were a few competing but popular notation standards for sharing lat/lon/zoom/<sometimes more> that was meant to be human readable and compatible with any WMS or similar.

Ah... to imagine a world where you could just share a coordinate string and people could open it in whatever map app/page they wanted. Geo URI is probably the closest we have today but I don't think much of anything outside the OS Geo community accepts it.

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I think that's actually a separate issue. What I specifically want from a Google Maps share URL is for it to be something I can send over text that will reproduce for my recipient exactly what I see.

A lat/lon/zoom/start?/dest? is kind of what a Google Maps share currently is, but it's neither an interoperable standard nor a reliable capture of the current state, so really the worst of both worlds.

(Also, hi AB! Nice to see you on here)

Hi! I think I’m on the same page (give or take a zoom level) now. That is hard to do between separate geodatabases (hence CRS, placenames, geocoding, etc.) but Google isn’t even doing it within their own. And the only way I can obtain a link is to first place a pin, which wants to snap to nearby features. If I try to link a nice trail near my home it snaps to the quarry instead, making me look like a maniac with a terrible idea of what a “quiet walk” looks like.

The other reason someone might want a screenshot specifically isn't to share a location, but to share a route. For instance, I might want to text a friend a screenshot of my driving route. Maps can sometimes route weirdly, so this is definitely a use-case I've needed before.

I've noticed similar things with off-road biking as well. Hydrocut generally does an okay job of snapping to the trails there since Google knows about them, but I was at Rondeau this weekend, and Google kept insisting I was on the adjacent Lakeshore Rd rather than the Harrison trail [1] that I was actually on. And this had real consequences because my youngest and I had become separated from the rest of our group and were trying to use a "share my location" through Signal, but the Android system-supplied location used was the one that had been unhelpfully snapped to the road.

[1]: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/canada/ontario/harrison-trai...

Google does provide an interoperable standard for communicating lat/lng pairs via text: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/

I believe it was their response to what3words. It's not as good at the "communicating by text" use case as what3words.

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