Geographic Tags in HTML

Last year I posted some proposals for geographic tagging of Web pages.
It was pointed out that there might be more interest if there
was an application.

So, now there is a demo application - http://geotags.com/script/geosearch

Other changes - the "country" tag has been dropped, merged into "region".
"region" now formally uses ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes, available
from http://geotags.com/geo/iso3166 (I think - the 'net's broken 'twixt me
and there at present). ISO 3166-2 for the US and Canada is trivial - "CA"
or "US" hyphen State/Province e.g. US-NY or CA-BC. ISO 3166-1 alone is
allowed for geo.region, e.g. "RU" - the old "geo.country" tag.

geo.position follows RFC 2426 (vCard), which many people are now using
(at least, lat;long is in the vCard RFC and many people are using vCard,
which is admittedly not quite the same thing as many people using lat;long
...)

Precis:

     <META NAME="geo.position" content="48.54;-123.84">

   describes a resource at position 48.54 degrees North, 123.84 degrees
   West.

     <META NAME="geo.placename" content="London, Ont">
     <META NAME="geo.region" content="CA-ON">

   describes a resource in London, Ontario, Canada

These tags are only meaningful, and should only be used, for
pages that relate to a specific place. You put geo.position on the
page for your walk-in retail store, not on your resume or 
software manual. (geo.region is OK if the page really does have some
regionality, e.g. "CA" on Canadian tax preparation software)


More information at http://geotags.com


Andrew Daviel      
Vancouver Webpages

Received on Friday, 28 April 2000 23:12:42 UTC