Neil R. Ormos wrote: > > The geo format does not appear to be > > overcomplicated. > > Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder I guess. > I see DIV this, Class that, a bunch of angle > brackets, alternative forms. So much extra stuff > for so little gain, and, bonus!, incompatible with > prior formats.
Arbitrary HTML can have lots of confusing source. To me, the geo format seems like a pretty basic way of identifying geographic coordinates in the confusion of possible content that an arbitrary Web page might have.
> As one simple but effective example, the > coordinates could be encoded in a conventional > URL.
There's no standard there, either. I suppose we could pick one, say Topozone or Tiger, and use that for the standard. But what if you want to create a Web page that has some geographic coordinates on it somewhere and you don't want to create a link? How would you drop a URL in a Web page in a way that a browser just displays the coordinates, not a link? The geo format provides one solution.
> Also, there have been numerous prior XML formats > for representing geospatial data, including > Garmin's format and several for GIS applications.
I was hoping you would cite one that seems targeted at what the geo format seems to be targeted at, namely identifying geographical information in arbitrary Web pages. For creating files of waypoints, something like LOC files or GPX files solve the problem, but I'm not sure you can embed those formats in an arbitrary HTML page to identify a latitude/longitude that appears somewhere on a page of text.