Have you ever noticed that Google has skipped a UI beat in Google Maps and Google Earth?

Try entering a latitude / longitude value to either.

Unless you get it exactly right, both systems fuss and stonewall.

Why?

Is there some silly patent out there?

Anyway, it turns out that parsing lat/lon gets dirty fast. Sort of like parsing arbitrary time/dates.

Here’s a shot: /cgi-bin/latlon_cgi.py.

Har, har. Should someone write a GreaseMonkey script to “fix” input to Google Maps with an XMLHttpRequest? That would be keeping in the Web 2.0 river.