HTML, XHTML & CSS

Chapter 15: Bring the Best of the Web to Your Web Site
In our initial discussion in this chapter, we explain how you could spend
hours drawing a new map, such as the one we drew of Austin (and a not very
good one at that). We exported that image onto a static Web page using the
element. Visitors to this page saw a crude map of Austin with
zero interactivity, as shown in Figure 15-4.
Figure 15-4: You could use a quick-and-dirty hand-drawn map.
As a more powerful alternative (check out www.dummieshtml.com/examples/
ch15/map-google.html), we can sign up for a Google Maps API key, and
follow the steps in its free tutorial to create a sample map. (For brevity, we’ll
skip those steps here.) After creating the sample map, we can customize the
map’s latitude and longitude for Austin. This is absolutely essential because,
by default, Google pulls up a map from Australia! That’s very much the long
way around for Ed’s party.
Visitors to this page can view four different map versions: a 2D map, a satellite
view, a hybrid map (satellite overlaid with 2D), or terrain views of Austin.
They can also use the map interface to pan left, right, up, or down, as well
as zoom in or out to whatever level of detail they like (from the tiniest nooks
and crannies to the whole continent).
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