Lately, I can only get it together for brief free-time hacks. So, this evening I decided to spend an hour munging some of the TIGER/Line data for San Francisco into a ECMAScript data structure and then with the left over time I wrote a simple renderer for the new Canvas tag.
Unless you're into this sort of thing, I don't suggest you follow the link below. It looks just like the screen shot in this post, and you'll wait a while for the 1.4MB of map data to load. Then (if you're running a new Safari or a Deer Park alpha) you'll see a straight line drawing of San Francisco.
It is interesting to see how different canvas implementations hold up to this sort of abuse. If we were to build a real map renderer on top of this technology, we would need to be smarter about how we go about switching between LODs and mixing with raster data.
None too shabby.
I suppose you've already seen the civicspace tile engine thing today.
Posted by: Daniel OConnor | June 20, 2005 at 10:46 PM
I did see the civicspace announcement. Though it's a bit rough, I like their general approach.
Posted by: Trevor | June 21, 2005 at 07:48 AM
"If we were to build a real map renderer on top of this technology, we would need to be smarter"- or just go back to ink on cotton, technophile ;), love, A Cartophile
Posted by: dgh | June 23, 2005 at 11:21 AM