I am totally in love with http://maps.google.com/.
I've been studying it intently for some time now, and I'm really itching to try and put together something similar myself for some map data I have. Google really know both what can be done with DHTML and what should be done with it. maps.google.com uses some fairly simple tricks to do its thing, but it is extremely successful at doing it.
Needs more Safari compatibility -- for some reason, I can only zoom in so far before the maps are entirely blue, as if I'm looking in the middle of the ocean or something. Also, search is broken. I don't understand why they wouldn't try for 100% compatible code from the get-go instead of making something that halfway works and then having to patch it up later...
> BETA
Because pretty much every browser breaks compatibility in some way, and never in the same way as another. Overall, Firefox is pretty good, but Safari is still lagging a bit. IE is horrid, of course, but it's big enough that you end up having to put in all the special cases for it anyway.
Discounting IE, you can write simple DHTML against the standards and have it work across most browsers, but once you do something a bit more fancy, you'll have to pick and choose among the feature you use because they'll be broken or not implemented in this or that browser.
map24.com is also good, and it has smooth zooming as well as scrolling. It also covers Europe. Does anyone find themselves just playing with the maps? I've started following rivers from major cities, to their source or mouth.
map24.com uses Java, and is much uglier.
>>2
Now it's throwing up a work-in-progress page for Konqueror (= KHTML = Safari).
It does work nicely with Firefox, though. OoooOOOooohhhh drop shadows!
I'd take "ugly" but perfectly smooth scrolling/zooming over google map's annoying delays with loading the map chunks, and discrete zoom levels.
Still, for what it's worth, it's pretty much pushing dhtml to the limits. Nice.
Maybe Google should think of a more active way of cache image data on the map, instead of guessing that everyone has a fast enough connection to load it perfectly.
The map tile loading doesn't bother me nearly as much as having to start up Java, which locks up your browser for a good while, IF you have it installed, which I didn't so I couldn't even test when I looked at map24.com the other day.
This is DHTML; it is entirely up to the browser to cache the data, which it does, too.