Chapter 9: Geolocation

Remy Sharp

IN THE UK, when red telephone boxes were still a common sight, inside each box was a printed note indicating the address you were calling from. This was so that if you had to call the police or an ambulance you knew where you were. Of course, this also helped after a hazy Friday night, calling home for a lift because you didn’t know where you were. This is the essence of Geolocation—except without the beer.

The geolocation API has absolutely nothing to do with the HTML5 specification, and was created by the W3C rather than the WHATWG. In fact, it was never even part of the original Web Applications specification (though it does now reference the HMTL5 specification), but it’s so darn cool that we had to include ...

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