[cabalamat]

> Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results.

Imagine if a URL resolved to different addresses in each country you were in. Would that be a better system than what we have now, or a worse one? I think it would self-evidently be worse.

I'm surprised they didn't make mapcodes a globally-unique identifier.

[cwp]

Globally-unique identifiers make sense on the web, where "going" to a website being served from the other side of the world is as easy as one served from across the street.

That's not true for navigation in the physical world. If you're sitting in Nebraska, how often do you have to navigate to a location in Mongolia? Approximately never! Map codes are optimized for the common case, where you want to go to a location that's nearby.

In fact, it's even more clever than that, since it defines "nearby" as a political unit. Borders may be artificial, but they're real, and crossing them has practical implications. If you're planning to buy something in another jurisdiction, there might be tax implications. You may need your passport to cross the border. You may not speak the language of that area. All of this means that having the political unit as a human-readable part of the map code is useful.

Finally, consider that some URLs do resolve differently depending on where you are. They're called relative URLs. They're very handy and very common. I'd guess that the vast majority of URLs on the web are relative. MapCodes work the same way. The code "Ireland 0C.T4" is globally unique. If you're already in Ireland, you can omit the territory, much as you would omit the country when inviting a friend to your house for dinner.

For cases where you really do have to travel to the other side of the planet, is it really so onerous to specify "Mongolia 0C.t4"?

[lstamour]

They did, it just doesn't suit the purpose they had: quick entry into GPS systems; it's true URLs or QR codes would work too, though nothing's stopping such a resolver service from popping up, except of course that non-phone GPS systems probably don't have cameras yet.

> Finally, on top of any and all national mapcodes a location may have, it also always has a 9-letter, context-less map code.

But that's too long to use every day... It would be like requiring all streets to have globally unique names. Because they're qualified by location, you could, if you wanted to, enumerate all matches in order of distance, and in 90% of cases, that would be the location you're looking for. Better here, since many cities will have the same street names in multiple places ;-)

[richardw]

Phone numbers are very similar. They have a short and long representation and the short is often duplicated in different countries. Imperfect but a very human solution: works because it's easy and 99% of the time we call the right number.