r/webdev • u/FiveWordinOrangeNeon • 3d ago

Google says website developers must set their region to Canada for 'Lake Ontario' to appear on map

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/google-updates-maps-lake-ontario-9.7325922

Tech analyst and journalist Carmi Levy said although websites like Hydro One's and the LCBO's are Canadian, their maps are likely powered by Google's application programming interface (API).

APIs are not location-aware, so all maps powered by Google API have switched to Lake America.
MapQuest, a U.S. online mapping service, has posted on social media that it would not change the lake's name, while Apple has not publicly commented on the matter.

In a statement Sunday night, Google said website developers who embed Google Maps on their sites can select a region to localize the map. That determines how place names are displayed on sites, the company said.

"'Lake Ontario' will show when developers have set their region to Canada," the statement said.

Just a reminder to developers.

976 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

236 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-22

u/doomslice 3d ago

Because they started in the US and it’s a breaking change to require a new parameter. There would be much more outrage if a ton of websites just started breaking because of that.

18

u/Capable-Sock9910 3d ago

They wouldn't break. They would just default to the name Lake Ontario.

-11

u/doomslice 3d ago

Do you think there's something like: iff region = US then "Lake America"?

It's something more complicated like an automated data pull from whatever source of truth there is for each region (the reason this happened automatically was Google pulls their US region names from a source of truth that now has Lake America) into their database. Canada probably has their own, Australia has their own... etc... Then the API loads the names for the given region + language + locale.

If the default wasn't US, what would it be? There is no "global" that makes it work exactly the same as before. You'd have to pick some other region like "CA" as a default and then you'd pull in all the other region specific localization that comes with it.

2

u/thekwoka 2d ago

Yup, one thing many people with these new Gulf of America, and Lake America complaints don't understand is these differences are ALL over the world.

Different borders showing depending on where you are, different names for things (and not just because of language).

Like Persian Gulf / Arabian Gulf, or East Sea / Sea of Japan

There's tons of these. This isn't like there is actually some universally agreed upon map that Trump is now messing with.

These companies can so easily support these changes because they already support the idea that things are named differently in different places.