Comment by mikepurvis
15 hours ago
I would happily use the Google Maps "share" feature, but I've yet to encounter any but the simplest of scenarios where it actually preserves the entire context of what I'm trying to share: the viewport, the start and destination, stops along the way, route choice, the time of day, all of it.
If I'm sending a screenshot it's because I want to send exactly what I see on my screen and not have my recipient's gmaps instance happily recompute a route it thinks is better or leave out the routing information I included, or switch from biking to driving directions, or whatever else.
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.
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.
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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.
I have a seething hatred for google maps links people send on mobile because Google no longer shows you the map in your mobile browser. It has for at least a year or twoo required Google Maps be installed to show you what the person linked to.