[georss] Discovery of georss and other geographic information?

[Mikel Maron]

In discussion with Kevin Marks, he came up with the idea to re-use HTML image maps 
for an XHTML/microformat serialization of the line/polygon/box geometries.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#h-13.6.1

The neat thing about this is that it satisfies two microformat principles..
- the data be human parseable
- reuse existing structures

There are many problems of course. Areas are simply defined in x/y coordinates, not lat/longs.
How would a line be defined? And wouldn't the image need to reflect the geometry as well?

Anyway, some food for thought.


> There has also been work on an XHTML serialization of the GeoRSS  
> content model which was published earlier on the georss website, but  
> it remains to achieve some consensus on this, both that it is  
> important to do this (for example, so that GeoRSS items can be  
> reliably constructed from the tags in an HTML resource), and how to  
> go about it (span, div, object, etc.). In principle it could be very  
> simple along the pattern of the geo microformat:
>
> <span class="georss:point" title="43.3432 -69.2341">...</span>
> 
> and/or
>
> <span class="georss:point" >43.3432 -69.2341</span>
>
> The former makes more sense at least to me in terms of an intent to  
> tag specific content in the HTML document with location information.
> 
> To add more information one might add another level of span tags:
> 
> <span class="georss">
>    <span class="georss:line"  title="43.3432 -69.2341 42.3432  
> -68.2341">
>       ...
>    </span>
>   <span class="georss:radius" title="5000"/>
> </span>
> 
> There is certainly some question as to the semantic appropriateness  
> of using the class attribute to hold what is really a property name  
> such as georss:point and using the title attribute for holding what  
> is really the value of that property. A more appropriate approach  
> might be to use the OBJECT tag, but that seems less compatible with  
> the present microformat style.