Encoding geospatial information in URLs

I admit it. I'm a geowanker. It comes with the territory of someone trying to bring the joys of geospatial information to the world of PDF aficionados. Andy Armstrong had a couple of nifty ideas on the geowanking mailing list:

Now define a 'geo:' URL scheme that uses that representation as the address:

The location is <a href="geo:astbfqklzp">here</a>

Clicking on a link would take you to a map but it'd be your choice of map rather than the author of the original page's choice of map. You could, for example, set things up so that clicking on a geo: URL fired up your route planning software and started a new route with your home as the start point and the location described by the link as the destination.

If you use the Military Grid Reference System with WGS84 to encode the location, your system is now compatible with any GPS on the planet. If google puts a hacker or two on hacking Firefox to kick off a map search request, maybe with context from the content of the stuff between the a tags, can you say see ya, mapquest?

Here's another cool thing about using MGRS for the encoding. You can include implicit information about the scale by limiting the precision of the code. For instance, I'm hunkered down at 81 50 16.8W 36 25 51.5N, or MGRS 17SMA2488532078. That's probably overkill for the notion of Marietta, Cobb County, or Georgia. Say we want something to only 100 m resolution: 17SMA248320. Your zoom level has arrived...

This is cool.