Simon Willison’s Weblog

map.search.ch

5th January 2005

Forget about Google Suggest; if you want to see some really impressive dynamic web content go and have a play with map.search.ch. It uses XMLHttpRequest and a bunch of other tricks to let you smoothly pan and zoom over an enormous and detailed map of Switzerland, based on satelite photos (so you can zoom right in to individual streets and see the houses). Even better, it supports hackable URLs letting you link directly to cities or even street addresses.

The dynamic map resizes with your browser window, and the whole lot works in pretty much every modern browser (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Konqueror) and degrades to a static version for everything else.

It launched back in October but I hadn’t heard anything about it until Harry tipped me off. 2005 is going to be an exciting year.