Mmm, we are indeed living in interesting times. Apart from a mis-calculation on the rapture. Well this topic came up yesterday with my UI designer. Well he had not yet transitioned to HTML5, but as a designer i think HTML 5 is really worth your time, he said. One of the new additions to HTML5 is the map tag. Depicted as <map>. To have a look at this, have a look at this sample the guys over at W3C put up. If you go ahead and click on one of the planets, the different planets appear from another HTML. Well this can be tied in to Javascript Event. And one can build exciting stuff around this. I try to fathom of how this would have been done via HTML 4. Well for instance on HTML 4, one would have to write Javascript code to get the co-ordinates of the clicked event. With HTML 5 one can get these co-ordinates via the coords attribute. Before one would have a click event for that. This is something i am really interested to be looking at.
Given the recent announcement by Apple CEO that they would not support Flash and rather support HTML 5, this without a doubt makes it easy to create good looking attractive maps (‘sexy‘). If my mum was an avid reader of this blog, I think she would have knelt down, done the sign of the cross and prayed hard what her son just wrote up there!lol. Anyway, I got shocked when that term was used at a meeting and felt very jumpy. Anyway moving on swiftly. Decided to look at what people have done with HTML 5 and mapping and this is what i came across by the guys over at GisCloud. These guys are doing some great stuff. Have a look here. Looking at the source of the code you notice they do have a function part of their API to return HTML5 compatible map. Well lets see if i can find its specification on fire bug. And plagiarize 
. But what amazed me about this was the rendering speed. It has got very many polygons, but it loads seamlessly.Try loading the non HTML 5 sample and see the difference, though it has a lot more to load. Then came the question, will Google Maps API for flash be deprecated in favor of HTML 5? #justasking? Well HTML 5 is a more open than Flash. And am thinking all those Flash creation software, are they on their death bead about to kick the bucket?
Some devs have seen the opportunity and providing translators from Flash to HTML 5. Other benefits that come with HTML 5 is the video object, iframe object. Remember how hard it is to embed a video? Well hope the guys over at Eziki.tv are looking into HTML 5. Its more efficient and reduces the lines of code one has to write.
One of the things i stumbled upon, is Cartagen.And i was of the opinion this must come tenth to sliced bread. Beauty of sytling your maps according to CSS? Bliss. Atleast now i can concentrate on maps and by changing css values uses can style maps. He makes use of GSS. He refers to GSS as Geo Style Sheet and is what is used in styling.Surprisingly i looked for it among the OpenGeo standards and could not find its specification. 
. Sad Though i have to admit his maps look gewd..The other beauty of this is that, maps created with Cartagen use less bandwidth and can run easily on Android and Iphone platforms.
Well let me dig more into HTML 5 mapping and see what i can come up with…before the world end on 21 October..
Cheers,