W3C Geolocation API

The W3C Geolocation API is an effort by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize an interface to retrieve the geographical location information for a client-side device. It defines a set of objects, ECMAScript standard compliant, that executing in the client application give the client's device location through the consulting of Location Information Servers, which are transparent for the application programming interface (API). The most common sources of location information are IP address, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC address, radio-frequency identification (RFID), Wi-Fi connection location, or device Global Positioning System (GPS) and GSM/CDMA cell IDs. The location is returned with a given accuracy depending on the best location information source available.

Web pages can use the Geolocation API directly if the web browser implements it. Historically, some browsers could gain support via the Google Gears plugin, but this was discontinued in 2010 and the server-side API it depended on stopped responding in 2012.

The Geolocation API is ideally suited to web applications for mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and smartphones. On desktop computers, the W3C Geolocation API works in Firefox since version 3.5, Google Chrome,Opera 10.6,Internet Explorer 9.0, and Safari 5. On mobile devices, it works on Android (firmware 2.0+), iOS, Windows Phone and Maemo. The W3C Geolocation API is also supported by Opera Mobile 10.1 — available for Android and Symbian devices (S60 generations 3 & 5) since November 24, 2010.

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