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from the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY dept.
When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.
One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.
However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.
The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.
what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.
Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.
Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.
Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.
People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.
The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)
There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.
Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday November 02 2015, @07:25PM
Woah! Hold up there. Read the last sentence of his post:
Two different things. The OP said nothing about cross-site scripting. The OP refuses to run ALL JS.
The map on that three word page depends on JS to run. I'm no web programming expert (I have played with some interactive client-server stuff) but I don't think you can make such an interactive webpage without JS. Even if the map were rendered server side, what would enable the smooth click-and-drag panning? You would go back to the old mapquest interface where there was a north/south/east/west button that told a server side CGI script to painfully move the map view around one unit per click. I think that would also require the page to reload. No thank you.
I agree that cross site scripting is a PITA. I know it bogs down a lot of sites. But some sites are so complex they have functionality spread across different servers, use 3rd party services like content hosting/analytics/ecommerce/etc, and of course, advertising. It sucks but the tangled web they wove is they way things are. I can't tell you how many times privacy badger crippled an entire e-commerce site because the site used some external service that drove part of it's interface.
And my biggest gripe with JS: The ability of JS to trap a user on a webpage using the onunload event combined with message boxes must die. I have come across hijacked google image searches for even benign things that trap you in one of those "ALERT! FBI is watching you." or "Computer virus detected click here to clean your computer!" And they hijack the entire browser by using a single message box that loops while playing some alert siren sound or even a voice message. You then have to terminate the browser because the browser is so brain dead, it brings all focus to the message box and disables ALL controls (I'm looking at you, Google Chrome). PLEASE! For the love of all that is holy and good: DO NOT let JS ever, EVER control anything outside of the page content itself. Oh, you closed your browser in the middle of writing a 10000 word essay in web-word without clicking save? Or You closed your browser in the middle of a 10 step ordering process? Too bad. Seriously, too fucking bad. I'd rater client side security and safety than brain dead convenience. Besides, the page can autosave server-side using JS without interacting with the browser window. That right there is one big reason JS is a security risk. Sure it can't harm your PC but it is social engineering that cons people into spending money and installing malware. And web browser developers can fix that by removing that functionality.