Ways to get location of the client from the browser?

Question

What i need is the lat/long of the client(via browser)

Found some articles on the net,found some in stack overflow itself(an old article) Get GPS location from the web browser. it was answered almost 18months ago -- wondering if there's any other(more efficient) way of getting the information of the location of the user from the browser.

Soo far,found 2

using Maxmind

• http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/08/entering-the-wonderful-world-of-geo-location/

Other,using google's api

• http://briancray.com/2009/05/29/find-web-visitors-location-javascript-google-api/

w3c's geo api will have downward compatibility issues: http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html ,so not choosing that.

Found a site, www.drumaroo.com -- requests for the location to be shared the 1st time when we drop into the site.Needed something similar

Answer 1

The user can be located by using following ways:-

1. Using the IP addr. easiest to achieve but most unreliable due to the uncertainty of network addresses / topologies.
2. Using the latitude, longitude pair most accurate solution, but most of the end users don’t know about their latitude, longitude value.
3. Using the zipcodes nice to think but quite difficult to achieve, although ZipCodes are being used for
   quite a long time but this is not a standard yet. (see link
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code ). ZipCode alone is not sufficient for calculation of distance we need to convert it to latitude, longitude pair which is an
   overhead.
4. Using user’s address most compelling thought since each user will have at least one geographic address. Address alone is not sufficient for calculation of distance we need to convert it to latitude, longitude pair which is an overhead.

The Best option will be to use options 2,3.4 together, You can do that in two steps:-

1. First determine the latitude, longitude from the address.
2. Then use this lat, long value for further processing i.e. storing in database etc.

For various options available for this see the answer of this question

Answer 2

Try HTML5 geolocation

 function init() {


 var mapOptions = {
    zoom: 8,
    mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
 };


 map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map-canvas'),
  mapOptions);



if(navigator.geolocation) {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
  var pos = new google.maps.LatLng(position.coords.latitude,
                                   position.coords.longitude);

  var infowindow = new google.maps.InfoWindow({
    map: map,
    position: pos,
    content: 'Location found using HTML5.'
  });

  map.setCenter(pos);
}

 } else {
alert('Geolocation not detected');   
}
}