Hi Norman, I dont know if this is a problem of my browser or if you misscode the Umlauts in my landmarks. I see some wrongly appearing ö at http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/witw/ami/landmarks and http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/witw/is?userid=goern gives me an parse error right after I added the landmark.

Great work, Norm!

However, I'd like to see the ami/now form provide my landmarks as choices. The whole reason I set up landmarks was so as not to have to specify exact long/lat when I move from New York City to Austerlitz or vice versa. (And I don't agree that there is no significant difference between is/johnwcowan and ami/now, because they produce different results when GOTTEN.)

This of course leads to a semantic issue: what does it mean to be "at" a landmark? The Empire State Building is certainly a landmark in NYC; does saying I'm there imply that I'm actually at that *building*, or merely that I'm (reasonably) close to the lat/long of the building?

The precision (and accuracy) of measurement may have something to do with the question. I entered the most precise lat/long figures for the ESB I could find (hopefully, just as accurate), namely to 8 significant figures, but you only display them to within .01 degree, which is about 1 km for latitude and (at my latitude) about half that much for longitude. My house and my workplace are certainly within a km of the ESB.

(BTW, I continue to be annoyed that you don't pre-transform blank lines to

before invoking TagSoup. I expect blank lines in plain text to "work".)

Thanks, John.

I agree that the POST form should provide your landmarks as choices. That's the obvious thing to do now that per-userid landmarks exist. I'll be overhauling the way the per-user data is stored and updated and I'll fix that deficiency when I do that.

Reworking the API to be more RESTful, allowing PUT and POST to the isa/userid address, will mean figuring out how to tell the server to present the form instead of the pretty-printed data. One idea I have is to deal with it the way I deal with the landmark data. That is, make the form with a client-side stylesheet. Then I could serve two stylesheet pointers and let you pick the "form" stylesheet if you wanted to do updates. But that'd rely on user agents that supported both client-side XSL and stylesheet switching. Another idea is to add a parameter: isa/userid?form=1. Maybe I'll do both.

I'm not sure how to deal with the semantic issue of being "at" a landmark. I had in mind that saying you were at the Empire State Building meant you were in that building, but I'm not sure that's a practical use for landmark data. I suppose I could assert a definition for "reasonably close", say less than 2km, but I'm not sure that's a good idea.

With respect to the displayed accuracy of the latitude and longitude data, I was just trying to make the pages "look nice". The values you enter are preserved exactly as you entered them and used for location and proximity calculations (though the great-circle-distance algorithm that I'm using at the moment claims to have accuracy issues for points separated by less than about 5 degrees).

And finally, I completely agree about blank lines. I should look into that. I should also upgrade to a more recent TagSoup.

Ok, John, I think I've improved the blank line handling.

Now blank lines become paragraph boundaries as long as your comment doesn't include any explicit <p> or <pre> elements.

If you put your own /<p/ markup in, then you have to put it all in.

Better? Good enough?

Come to think of it, do per-user landmarks really make so much sense, at least on the use side? I might own the ESB in terms of who gets to modify the entry, but why should I own it in terms of being the only one who gets to say he is at/near it? Why not give me a choice of all currently defined landmarks to specify my location with?

Why not simply display both pretty-printed data and form simultaneously? Things like "view source to see the data" are pretty hacky.

On reflection, I think that the semantics of landmarks should be changed to "near", with "near" left undefined; you are near a landmark if, in your opinion, you are near enough.

I like the new approach to blank lines. Maybe I'll even make it a TagSoup feature. :-)

Letting users choose from all landmarks, not just their own, is among my plans. I'm not sure I like the idea of displaying the form and the data, that's going to encourage folks to POST when they don't have accounts or when they aren't viewing their own data. I suppose I could provide a cookie and show you the form for your data automatically.

And yes, I think 'near' is the way to go.

Anyway, WSDL is out of the way, so I'll be hacking my way through an update over the next week or so.