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Anyone with a basic math or science background is intimately familiar with (x, y) coordinate ordering on a cartesian plane, where the horizontal component comes
by perrygeo 4y ago
Anyone with a basic math or science background is intimately familiar with (x, y) coordinate ordering on a cartesian plane, where the horizontal component comes before the vertical. From that perspective (Long, Lat) is the only obvious ordering; and geospatial software has used it by convention for decades. There are thousands of different projections and spatial reference systems and they all use X, Y ordering. Why would you create a special case just for one?
Now you could make the case that Longitude and Latitude are NOT cartesian coordinates and thus not beholden to the x,y convention. Fair point, but we still encode it as a pair of coordinates as if it were a 2D reference system (technically the Platte Carre projection) like any other. Switching the coordinate order feels like a strange hill to die on - again, why a special case?
In any case, it's wildly inaccurate to place the blame on GeoJSON which was just following the widely held, and mathematically consistent, convention.
- dekhn 4y agoI work with plenty of systems that put y first. Like opencv. Of the Geo software I've used about 30% of them put lat first. It's one of the things I most commonly spent debugging
- perrygeo 4y agoI guess there is really no "obvious" ordering, it all depends on your past experience. Named data structures are a way around it, but coordinates represented as tuples/lists/arrays seems cursed to repeat this mistake.