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.
Heheh, I wrote the same bookmarklet! Indeed, I was happy to read about the Firefox extension, although I’m currently waiting for it to be updated so that it works with Fx 3.0 (Gran Paradiso). This is currently the only reason I still sometimes use Firefox 2.
And like you, I am also disappointed that uptake is slow. Flickr.com and property-england.com are starting to use it. But with Satnav now in pretty much every car in Europe and the US, not to mention web-enabled mobile phones, you would think more webmasters would be doing this.