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> The Open Location Code characters exclude easily confused character pairs. There is a risk that "VV" will be confused for "W" in handwritten messages but we c
by mkl95 4y ago
> The Open Location Code characters exclude easily confused character pairs. There is a risk that "VV" will be confused for "W" in handwritten messages but we consider this to be unlikely, since that would change the length of a code and this should be detected by the user or recipient.
Never assume users will "detect" some tiny detail.
Overall their spec sounds like some googler spent some time writing a DSL on top of lat/long and they are a victim of sunk cost fallacy, so they had to put an API in front of it.
- Kwpolska 4y agoYeah, that seems like a bad design choice. If you look at the spec [0], you can see that they only use "23456789CFGHJMPQRVWX" in the codes. They apparently scored the letters based on how well they can spell 10000 words in 30 languages, without thinking about character similarity. If they had involved actual humans instead of counting letter frequency, they might have noticed that the letter W looks similar to VV, and that its English name is "double U". And tried a letter like N or Y, which would be much harder to confuse. [0] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/main/docs/olc_definition.adoc#open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/main/docs/...