HTML5 and JavaScript Projects

Latitude & Longitude and Other Critical Requirements

The most fundamental requirement for this project, and the ones in the next two chapters, is an understanding of the coordinate system for geography. Just as a coordinate system is required for specifying points on a canvas or positions on the screen, it is necessary to use a system for places on planet earth. The latitude and longitude system has been developed and standardized over the last several hundred years. The values are angles, with latitude indicating degrees from the equator and longitude indicating degrees from the Greenwich prime meridian in the United Kingdom. The latter is an arbitrary choice that became standard in the late 1800s. There is a northern hemisphere bias here: latitude ...