A couple of years ago, I fudged together a “bookmarklet” which would extract embedded latitude/longitude coordinates from a page and open a MapQuest map in a pop-up window.
Well, that little hack has been trumped, and that’s not a worry to me. I learned from the recently relaunched GeoURL.org that someone has put together a Firefox extension which does similar, but better.
The best thing about Patrick Lauke’s extension is that it visually indicates when you’re on a page where it will work. Since this idea of geocoding pages is still kind of novel and not widely implemented, it’s nice to see at a glance when the button will do anything; mine just popped up a Javascript “alert” saying “no mapping info found.”
I’m still surprised that we seem so far from having geographical information “mean something” to a computer, though. Given that a lat/long pair (perhaps with altitude thrown in) is small and easily structured data, why can’t I pass geocodes around more easily, integrate them with mapping software, etc. Eventually.
