
I made an example app to show how Google map URLs should look - captainbenises
http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199
======
micheljansen
I think trying to make geo URLs nicer is a noble effort, but this approach
takes a far too naive world view.

Addresses are messy. In most parts of the world (even the "western world"),
addresses are hopelessly ambiguous and much of the world cannot nearly as
nicely be divided into a neatly hierarchical addressing system as this example
suggests.

Real-world addresses are ambiguous, confusing and messy. Pretty much the
opposites of qualities that make for a good URL scheme.

How do you deal with multiple places with the same name, or one place that is
known by many names? Disambiguation pages and 304 redirects to a single
canonical name (which might piss a _lot_ of people off if it's a disputed
area)?

Most civilised parts of the world have developed more precise, less ambiguous
addressing systems over time, using post codes and other systematic
approaches, but even those are not always watertight, often volatile and only
work for places where some body issued them (good luck in the desert or
ocean).

Geocoding is hard, and reverse geocoding (from a place to a name) is even
harder, but fortunately we already have a clear, concise and unambiguous way
to address places on earth: the Geographic Coordinate System. Every place on
earth can be addressed using a simple latitude/longitude coordinate pair. It's
not pretty or user friendly, but at least it's fool-proof.

Why not take a much simpler approach, similar to how many blogging platforms
generate pretty urls from post titles?

The URL in the example could then be:

    
    
      https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/199-Valencia-St-San-Francisco
    

Or just as conveniently:

    
    
      https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/Zeitgeist-Bar
    

This way, multiple URLs can exist for different entities in the same
geographic space.

Multiple places with the same name are also much less of a problem this way:

    
    
       https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street
    

vs

    
    
       https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street
    

For a real-word mapping service, there would probably be a need to specify a
zoomlevel or bounding box, but those could be provided as URL parameters.
Ironically, this is very close to how the URLs in Google Maps currently look.
Not as nice, but at least it's actually feasible and future-proof.

~~~
Terretta
> _In most parts of the world (even the "western world"), addresses are
> hopelessly ambiguous_

And yet, astonishingly, you get your mail. If the mail can find its way to the
right point, so can this type of URL.

Your counter examples are interesting but not what this example is showing: a
nice URL for a physical mailing address. Presumably one would fall back to
lat/lon if one is trying to do something other than find an address.

> _just as conveniently_

Contrary to the OPs example, having to look up lat/lon first in order to
pinpoint an address on a map seems not convenient at all.

~~~
micheljansen
> And yet, astonishingly, you get your mail. If the mail can find its way to
> the right point, so can this type of URL.

Yes, mail can find its way to the right point precisely because most countries
have added a post code to the addressing system in order to deal with
ambiguity.

Furthermore, mail is routed by machines, but ultimately delivered by people.
And not always flawlessly too (especially with "weird" addresses. I used to
live in a house with "28 1/3" as a number, which lead to massive problems).
URLs are expected to work without human intervention, so more precision is
required.

> Your counter examples are interesting but not what this example is showing:
> a nice URL for a physical mailing address.

No, the title of this post is "I made an example app to show how Google map
URLs should look". And who types URLs anyway. If you are on HN, you probably
belong to the tiny group of people who occasionally types
"google.com?q=myquery" into your address bar, but I'm pretty sure you did not
get to the page you are currently on by typing
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624287> URLs are not the best form of
user input, and even if they were, typing searching for "199 valencia st sf"
is a _lot_ more efficient (and less sensitive to errors) than typing the full
URL of this example ([http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california/...](http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199)).

So, the URL is not short enough to be useful for direct user input and not
precise enough to serve as a reliable permalink to a specific location, so
what exactly is it good for?

My example also sucks for direct user input (for reasons you mentioned:
lat/long coordinates are not user friendly), but at least they're better
permalinks. I'm not sure if a solution exists that does both well, and even
then, I'm not sure if it can beat search (hell, people already search for
"facebook" on Google rather than typing "facebook.com" into their address bar,
so how are we going to get people to use this?).

~~~
egypturnash
It's good for cutting and pasting into human-readable text:

Hey guys come to the launch party for my new startup! 9pm Saturday, at the
Mumblefrotz office: [http://maps.google.com/united-states/california/san-
francisc...](http://maps.google.com/united-states/california/san-
francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199)

(Note: no actual party Saturday, and that's the example URL the post pointed
to.)

In real world usage people will very often just cut and paste URLs directly
into text, rather than figure out how to turn it into a link. Would you rather
have this kind of link dumped in as plaintext, or would you rather have a
lengthy machine-friendly link full of raw lat/long data, view choices, dbrefs,
and whatnot?

Sure, fall back to a geolocation URL if it's not a point on a street grid. But
I suspect that a huge percentage of the map URLs that people pass around are
on street grids.

~~~
barryhunter
Just add /places/ in that URL, then it works...

[https://maps.google.com/places/united-
states/california/san-...](https://maps.google.com/places/united-
states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199)

------
chewxy
I understand the need for a nice URL, perhaps indicative of RESTfulness, but I
see a few problems with this:

1\. From a REST point of view - the map is the resource. The adddress is well,
not really a resource (the logic goes like this: if the address is the
resource, the browser as a resource getter should only get the address, not
the surrounds). IMHO the address should be modelled as an element of the
resource, accessible by Maps' javascript.

2\. Of course you can have nice URLs without being indicative of RESTfulness.
Consider an address in Japan. They do not have road names, instead, they use
building/block numbers for naming/addressing. While that can still be modelled
as a nice URL, the convention is now flipped, and people will be confused

3\. Consider that some places do not actually have an address. Like my former
residence. Due to changes in the roads, my place had a new road with no name,
and no actual address (well, eventually it did, and the road still has no
name. Getting pizza delivered was tough)

What can be done of course is a bit.ly kind of thing, which I think will work.
Something like /maps/199-valencia-street-san-francisco-california-united-
states. The current google maps url is already kinda like that (with ?q I
believe)

~~~
arethuza
"a nice URL, perhaps indicative of RESTfulness"

My understanding is that "nice URLs" and "RESTfulness" are orthogonal.
Difference implementations of the same RESTful interface could have completely
different URL formats and they should all be compatible with clients written
to the interface specification.

Having said that, best to have nice URLs _and_ RESTfulness.

~~~
rdsubhas
Agreed and well said. Nice URLs _do not have_ to be RESTful, but RESTful URLs
_have_ to be nice. Personally, its just OK for me if the entire URL looks
like:

maps.google.com/ _whatever-nice-text-describing-location_?ll=lat,long

If the lat/long is missing, then ask Maps to do a search. If its present, then
its just a "nice" URL. Not necessarily RESTful.

Edit: Formatting

~~~
bct
> RESTful URLs have to be nice

Not by any meaningful definition of REST.

------
rtpg
I live in Japan , your app doesn't work for me

I tried searching 日本東京都足立区足立２丁目 (google suggestion) and your app doesn't
accept.

we're able to get all the computers in the world to be more or less on the
same network but we still can't figure out encoding problems from 1982

edit: I messed up writing this, should have been 足立区六町２丁目. Using [http://nice-
map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/rokuch...](http://nice-map-
urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/rokucho/2) I get the right spot, but the
search box doesn't seem to work for me(but I am behind a very high-latency
line, it might be my connection that is borking)

second edit: seems that the resolution is around ward-level(even when
searching romanised addresses like "2-10-3 Honkomagome, Bunkyo, Tokyo", a
search which works in google maps) From an intuitive standpoint, there should
be no reason for this not to work, there's nothing particularly weird about
the address format. I dunno

~~~
captainbenises
I got this url, I'm not sure if it's correct (I don't read japanese sorry). :(

<http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/japan/tokyo/adachi/>

~~~
konstruktor
Does this 日本東京都足立区足立２丁目 look like this? japan/tokyo/adachi/ Hint: It doesn't.

------
paulsutter
People are making great points about ways to improve the service based on the
way addressss vary around the world.

Could we present these as helpful suggestions, especially including one or
more examples based on our local knowledge? Rather than everyone piling on
with dismissive one-upmanship?

~~~
gambiting
In the UK it's enough to provide a postcode and the house number to find a
specific place. So you can compress:

Flat 3, Bowsden Court, South Gosforth, Newcastle Upon Tyne

To: 3, NE3 1RR

And that's it, it just can't mean anything else.

However, in other countries, like Poland, a postcode is used per city, so a
postcode 32-600 is not telling you much apart from the name of the town, you
need to provide a full address.

~~~
grey-area
That's not true for most uk postcodes - many in rural areas represent an area
larger than even one town, so a full address is also required. They vary from
representing one address to hundreds, it's not really consistent.

It does seem strange that postcodes are not unique to addresses but they were
originally just zones intended to help routing. Eventually we will probably
end up with one global address space with unique identifiers for addresses
like ips and dns; it would clear up a lot of ambiguity while leaving the rest
of the address to function as a human readable equivalent. lat,lon doesn't
really work as addresses can be on top of one another.

~~~
dan1234
Do you have any examples of a UK house number & postcode combo that is used
for more than one address? I thought postcodes were unique to each street.

~~~
grey-area
Almost every rule you can think of will have many exceptions in the uk as
postcodes are an ad hoc scheme covering areas of varying size - my block of
flats has no number, many houses have a name, not a number, many rural houses
don't even have a street name or a number, just a name and hamlet name, and
many rural houses share a postcode but are not on the same street or even
sometimes in the same village. So postcodes are not unique to a street,
nowhere near it. Here a quick search for a rural location in Scotland sharing
a postcode:

<http://www.192.com/places/ph/ph34-4/ph34-4eu/>

There happen ( by chance ) to be two addresses sharing a number and postcode
there in the first 50 addresses, but that's the least of the problems for a
scheme using no + postcode as a unique id I'm afraid!

~~~
danpalmer
There don't seem to be any properties in that list that violate the rule? The
rule is house name or number and postcode. In the cases above, there are no
houses that conflict on names or numbers that I can see?

~~~
grey-area
This is not a full list of addresses, but there are two no 10s there, and
obviously as the postcode covers a large area with many streets, there will be
some duplicate numbers, and many houses don't even _have_ a number or street,
and if you start to include house names as numbers, you will have duplicate
names there too. Many addresses are as simple as rose cottage, village, POST
CODE, and there might be many 'rose cottages' in that postcode.

It would be nice if it was a unique identifier, but the uk postcode is not,
even combined with part of an address like 10, or even 10 high street,
sometimes the village is also required to narrow it down. This might have
worked for you on a limited set of data, but the assumptions are not valid
across the uk.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _Many addresses are as simple as rose cottage, village, POST CODE, and there
> might be many 'rose cottages' in that postcode._ //

This seems unlikely. In a small village people know the other house names
enough to avoid a collision - in England I've a feeling Parish Councils used
to keep order in this regard.

This page suggests that Local Authories legislate (bylaws I guess) on the
allowed names:
[http://www.housenameheritage.com/hnh_extras_officialviewlong...](http://www.housenameheritage.com/hnh_extras_officialviewlong.asp).

Quoting that link:

>" _The Local Authority will liaise with the Royal Mail to ensure there is no
conflict with names of other properties in the same street or immediate area,
before formally registering the name. If there is a problem, an alternative
name must be submitted. In some cases, the Local Authority may explore the
possibility of a house number being registered at this point, in addition to
(or instead of) the new name. Once the change has been approved, the Local
Authority will normally advise relevant bodies such as the emergency services.
The same procedure applies for brand new properties which, for whatever
reason, cannot be numbered (however, virtually all new properties today are
numbered)._ " //

~~~
grey-area
It may seem unlikely, but that's the way it works (see better examples in the
michaelt post above). Often postcodes cover more than one village, and there
are thus duplicate street numbers or names. Some attempt is made to avoid
clashes for new addresses, but there are plenty of existing ones. You need
more than a postcode and number to identify an address, sometimes a street
and/or village is also required.

------
buro9
[http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-lo...](http://nice-
map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-london/london/high-st)

Whilst it is a nice idea to put textual labels in, and whilst it may work for
grid-based cities such as those in the USA... it's really going to have a
problem in Europe where many large cities are the result of growth over
centuries and the merging of villages and towns into cities.

London has so much duplication in things like High Street, Church Street,
Chapel Lane, Market Place... and the system outlined will just fail to
disambiguate.

The only thing that could truly work on a global level is some geospatial
identifier in the URL, with text that followed it. But then if the place
itself was large it could span multiple geospatial points and result in
duplication.

Duplication of URLs is probably better than ambiguity over what the URL points
to.

PS: I tried to do a query on Open Street Map to discover how many High Streets
there are in London but I hit the limit of their disambiguity service. And
there are High Streets from one old village that have been extended to the
point that they touch the High Street of another old village. 2 different High
Streets with an almost identical postal code.

PPS: Perhaps a post-code? In the UK it's good enough to give someone a post-
code and door number and you can get to their front door. How that would work
globally I do not know... fine for most of the Western World, useless in India
maybe, etc.

~~~
captainbenises
In theory there should be only one high street per locality. I didn't try the
app with london urls (only berwick street which worked fine [1]). In theory if
you can unambiguously write the address of a place without relying on the
postcode, then you should be able to construct a unique url for the place.

1\. [http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-
lo...](http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-kingdom/greater-london/city-
of-westminster/london/berwick-st)

~~~
buro9
Theory meets practise.

It is not possible to unambiguously write all addresses in the UK without
including the post code.

The post code and door number are the primary key of the data.

Edit 1:

A fine example:
[http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=high+road%2C...](http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=high+road%2C+uxbridge&viewbox=-0.5%2C51.54%2C-0.44%2C51.51)
Zoom out one level and you'll see that High Road is surrounded on both sides
by High Street. And yes, that is correct.... High Street > High Road > High
Street = One road in one very old town.

Crazily if you look down a little further you'll see the Southern High Street
(A408) goes East, and what is technically _another_ High Street heads on
Southwards.

3 High Streets, and 1 High Road... in less than 1 mile in 1 town.

I was actually looking for the Church Road in Uxbridge that comes off of
Church Road, but I think Google Maps incorrectly has both of them as Church
Lane.

Edit 2:

Here you go: [http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/ub5/united-
kingdom/englan...](http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/ub5/united-
kingdom/england/greater-london/london-borough-of-ealing/london/church-ln)

Church Lane coming off of Church Lane. One is the A312, the other is just
Church Lane.

Google is wrong on this, they're both called Church Road. And historically
they were the same thing, but as it evolved from a way to get to the church to
a market thoroughfare one main road emerged and left the other road as a side
road. Over time this actually led to both roads being distinct, and with their
own door numbering schemes, even though they meet each other.

I find the history of places as fascinating as the history of languages.

~~~
goatforce5
The town I grew up in had a Something St that at the top of the hill changed
to a different street. A street also called Something St. Both have the same
postcode. There are many duplicate house numbers.

I think they were originally separate unjoined streets. But a road was built
up the hill, joining them together. I guess people couldn't agree on who
should have their houses renumbered.

If manually specifying the address you probably have enough wiggle room to
specify which 10 Something St you mean. I've encountered systems online that
will try to normalize and correct street addresses to an official format... I
could imagine that these would cause problems.

(And don't confuse those addresses with the 10 New Something St, or 10
Something Rd, both of which are only a few hundred meters away.)

------
vdondeti
I took another approach to this. I have been meaning to post it to HN for a
while, though it is still a little raw. I call it geokode -
<https://geokode.com> \- it is meant to be like bitly for location. You can
essentially choose what your url should be for any location. This makes it
very user-friendly and you can also brand your location link. Currently, you
can only use English characters and numbers. I have pre-populated it with some
entries (see examples below), but the goal is to get users to create their own
'geokodes' as I like to call them. I am also working on a API to make the
location data available once the geokode is provided. You can even link a
geokode to GPS coordinates, which will be especially useful in countries where
addresses are not simple. Obviously, the site needs a lot more polish, but let
me know what you think. It is currently free to register a geokode - I have to
update the demo video.

Some examples to highlight use cases:

<https://geokode.com/*abckitchen>

<https://geokode.com/*disrupt>

<https://geokode.com/*joneswedding>

<https://geokode.com/*dormroomfundhq>

Also, I will be at TC Disrupt in NY today in the Startup Alley in the Mobile
category. Feel free to come by.

~~~
hnriot
People already have geocodes, it's their address. Nobody wants yet another
address.

------
dsl
The biggest problem with geocoding is that not all places have addresses.
Especially in the developing/third world.

It also lacks a lot of things I normally link friends to in Google Maps. For
example when giving directions I always link to the street view of the main
entrance.

~~~
captainbenises
I think it'd be cool to have urls like:

[http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/congo/kasai-occidental/ka...](http://nice-
map-urls.herokuapp.com/congo/kasai-occidental/kasai/mweka/25km-northeast/)

------
konstruktor
Just because your native language can be expressed in ASCII, your name can be
split into a first and a last name and you live in a country with grid-like
streets doesn't mean that internationalization and anything related to
location is easy.

Apple learned it the hard way.

------
Sprint
This might seem nice for the USA but it would fail miserably in other places
(or require different URL schemes). I could not find a bigger discussion I
remember on HN but <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588289> might work
as example already.

------
aidos
I applaude the effort - but there are plenty of places where this falls apart.
The most glaring I can think of is Nicaragua - where addresses are described
based on landmarks:

Eg "From the Calvario Church, 1 block south, half a block east"

[http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-
info/14-addresses.htm...](http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-
info/14-addresses.html)

~~~
civilian
To be fair, a lot of things fall apart in Nicaragua.

I remember visiting some distant relatives in Sweden and the directions we got
were all "take the 3rd light down, and then you'll pass the park, swing a
right..." There were road names, my great-aunt just didn't know them. It
worked, but it was not a great system.

------
erikstarck
Cool. I'm working on something similar: <http://addressaddress.com> (be
gentle, still work in progress). I've mostly tested it with Swedish addresses,
so might be problems with US ones.

~~~
andyhmltn
The form on the front page doesn't seem to be submitting:

Chrome Version 24.0.1312.56 - Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Desktop)

~~~
D9u
Same here. But when I edited the URL to include my hometown, of which there
are 3 places sharing the same name, the inclusion of a zip code returned the
correct map.

------
the_imp
How exactly is this any nicer than what Google Maps already does?

[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=199+Valencia+St,+Mission+Dolor...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=199+Valencia+St,+Mission+Dolores,+San+Francisco,+CA,+United+States)

------
Millennium
It's a very nice-looking URL, but I'm not sure how practical it is. Although
the idea that "Cool URLs don't change" is not explicitly stated as one of the
core principles of REST, it is nevertheless important. But political
boundaries and names do change: some more frequently than others, of course,
but they all change in due time. If the URLs are not kept up-to-date, then the
mapping API becomes a lot less useful, but it also becomes a lot less useful
if they ARE kept up-to-date.

------
AlexeyMK
Not quite as heirarchical as what you've got, but check out
<http://mapof.it/199-valencia-st-san-francisco>

------
ultimoo
Nicely done.

I'd love it if it also supported modifying the URLs, since they are so
readable. For example, if I delete the 199 from the end of your URL [1], it
should still show me Valencia St. on the map. However, in its current state, I
don't think the app parses any incoming URLs from the location field.

[1] [http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california/...](http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199)

[2]
[https://maps.google.com/maps?q=199+Valencia+Street,+San+Fran...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=199+Valencia+Street,+San+Francisco,+CA&hl=en&ll=37.769951,-122.422264&spn=0.011975,0.02178&sll=37.770189,-122.422435&sspn=0.011975,0.02178&hnear=199+Valencia+St,+San+Francisco,+California+94103&t=m&z=16)

[I attached google's original link just for reference]

~~~
captainbenises
Thanks. Just pushed support for that...

[https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-
urls/commit/2fee561a61ede...](https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-
urls/commit/2fee561a61eded6216f3a3f91688ac6fb994d2a3)

------
barryhunter
Google Maps have tried this, I guess it failed, because it no longer
distributes such urls, but for the most part the old links still work, eg
<https://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st> or
<https://maps.google.com/places/uk/london>

In fact the 'example' url pretty much works

[https://maps.google.com/places/united-
states/california/san-...](https://maps.google.com/places/united-
states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199)

[http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2009/09/24/365/google-
place-...](http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2009/09/24/365/google-place-pages-
indexable-not-really/)

------
alessioalex
Btw it's cutting out some special chars to make the url pretty. Test this:
Pitești, Argeș, Romania

~~~
bestest
yeah, a definite lack of utf-8 character support -- but this could get a bit
ugly from the implementation point of view.

~~~
nakedrobot2
Yeah, lots of Czech characters get omitted - anything with an accent on it. So
this

Na baště Svatého Jiří, 160 00 Prague-Prague 6, Czech Republic

becomes this

[http://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/czech-republic/hlavn-msto...](http://nice-
map-urls.herokuapp.com/czech-republic/hlavn-msto-praha/prague/prague-6/na-bat-
svatho-ji)

~~~
captainbenises
I'm using iconv to convert from utf-8 to ascii, but the transliteration isn't
as complete as I'd like. :( Sorry it strips out prague addresses.

I tried using utf-8 urls but I couldn't work out how to handle them in rails.

Actually, looking at the search term you entered, I must have a bug, because
the iconv output is correct, it definitely shouldn't be stripping letters out
of the url.

~~~
jakobe
When converting from utf-8 to ascii with iconv, try specifying
"ASCII//TRANSLIT" as target encoding to avoid removing foreign characters.

~~~
pornel
Your foreign characters are my native. UTF-8 is 20 years old now. Just use it
already!

~~~
jakobe
Jeeze... do you really think that your native characters are a good idea to be
used in an URL? Take this URL for example: <http://archaeologie-
ooe.info/orte/hoersching>

I could have used UTF-8, and made the URL <http://archäologie-
oö.info/orte/hörsching>, but then all of the sudden 95% of the worlds
population couldn't type that URL anymore.

------
fsniper
Why everyone is trying to make this to work for every address available over
the world? Why not just let it work for where it can work for and then
iterate? What happened to the MVP idea?

This is a clever and intuitive idea. Nice work ;)

------
habosa
That is a very nice demo and those are very clean and readable URLs. However
I'm not sure how useful it is because I think one of the main advantages of
human readable URLs would be making a scheme that I could generate by hand
from an address I know. I think this scheme requires too much information,
specifically in the "neighborhood" part. I didn't even know what to put
between the city and the street in my own home address.

I like the suggestion here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625126>

------
joeblau
I wrote a speed trap application a few years ago and I used this similar
structure for speed trap locations. eg

    
    
        http://www.vroomtrap.com/speed-trap-list/united-states/california/san-francisco/1900-mission-st-san-francisco-ca-94103-usa--VT144-2
    

While that scheme works well in the US and in English, some other
countries/languages can't follow that pattern consistently. You'll also run
into name collions that will break your scheme. I had to add a unique ID at
the end of every address just to make sure I didn't get address collisions.

------
NelsonMinar
Google Maps URLs could sure use some help. But I don't know that street
addresses are a great naming system. If you want to use lat/lon, many open
source tools like Polymaps, ModestMaps, and Leaflet (with the leaflet-hash
plugin) support updating the URL automatically on navigation. (No "click here
for URL"). For example, here's a clean URL to a map app that describes the
base layer, zoom, and lat/lon:
<http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782>

------
dbg31415
Remind me again what the point is?

I think this takes an incredibly narrow view of addresses.

Many times they aren't just a number on a street -- one street can go by
multiple names, one street can have multiple identical numbers (seriously try
living outside of the US for a while). So what Google does is allow for
flexibility. And it works. Quite well. It's not perfect, but that's because
the real world didn't have an IA or DBA designing it.

Also, all those / can't be good for SEO...

------
rmc
Now make it work internationally.

Good luck with all the address formats and disagreements about addresses (and
places like Ireland where the address can be in either language).

~~~
raverbashing
And Belgium

(and Quebec maybe)

Not sure how GMaps deals with this

------
rocky1138
I get this in the JS console:

[blocked] The page at [https://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california...](https://nice-map-urls.herokuapp.com/united-
states/california/san-francisco/mission-dolores/valencia-st/199) ran insecure
content from
[http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?libraries=places&...](http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?libraries=places&sensor=false).

------
raverbashing
Stop it.

I know, nice idea, 'REST' etc, good looking.

Stop it.

As all the other comments stated, this will break down around the corner.

Country name. How do you locate a point in the ocean? What about Österreicht
(easy level). ประเทศไทย (hard level)

State name. Not all countries have states. Or they're not used day to day. So
in case of Ireland, do I put 'Dublin' or 'Leinster'

'Mission-dolores'? Street name? Street number?

Oh and by the way, the street numbers match the google maps position _if
you're lucky_ (it's getting better)

~~~
rschmitty
No, you stop it.

Why on earth are you concerned about a point in the ocean? Do you need driving
directions there? Or perhaps street view? I didn't realize most ships these
days navigate with google maps

I'm sure if google implemented something like this they would still support
search and linking by lat/lon.

~~~
raverbashing
"Why on earth are you concerned about a point in the ocean?"

Why would I really? After all it's only 2/3 of the planet.

More realistic case: streets that haven't been mapped, rural roads.

------
gojomo
I'm reminded of Derek Sivers' post about Japanese addresses:

<http://sivers.org/jadr>

------
sghill
Nice work on an interesting project! Google Maps' urls were always hideous for
sharing before they introduced the shortener.

Maybe worth noting? I opened this up in Firefox (Aurora) for Android, which
changes the URL bar to show only the page title until you tap it.

------
dexcs
I like the clean interface more than the clean url :) Google should look like
this...

------
mtgx
I wish Google would improve their Google+ url's, too, now. Are they still
allowing to choose your own vanity url, or did that work only for a limited
time period last year?

------
TillE
You got Berlin right and even split Kreuzberg off from Friedrichshain-
Kreuzberg. It's a little buggy and your URLs should probably convert ß to ss,
but I'm impressed.

~~~
konstruktor
For us native speakers of German, using ss instead of ß or ae instead of ä
seems like no big deal. But by accepting this when dealing with Americans, we
strengthen the belief that everything can be forced into ASCII, which really
fucks over people from countries that are smaller markets but either have
different character sets or where diacritical signs are semantically relevant.
edit: spelling

------
kaoD
_Paseo de la Estación_ turns into _paseo-de-la-estacin_ , which is not very
pleasant.

Don't just strip these! _paseo-de-la-estacion_ would be better.

------
magicor
This seems somewhat simpler <http://mapa.arredemo.org/> Anyway they both feel
nice.

------
kidsil
Directions might be tricky as the URL will become a lot longer (especially if
you're giving directions to multiple locations)

------
fractalsea
I loved the full screen-ness of it!

------
DivisibleByZero
It's always bothered me that Google doesn't have pretty URL formating. Well
done here.

------
vassilevsky
Good job on the URL and on the site as a whole.

------
rmhrisk
Cool, I would love to see the source.

~~~
captainbenises
Source is here...

<https://github.com/bnolan/nice-map-urls>

------
mnml_
Google isn't so good at SEO ? ;)

------
jakozaur
Nice, but I would make it realtime:

.../#united-states--california--

~~~
VMG
Not necessary - <http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html>

~~~
ishener
no support on IE 8,9 so yes - I would definitely use a hash to make it
ajaxified

~~~
simonw
So make IE8 and 9 do full page refreshes rather than compromising on URL
quality :)

~~~
ishener
that's not the right priority

------
FailMore
Fantastic.

------
tuananh
the whole thing is all about human-readble URL debate.

------
badkangaroo
i love this.

