Google Maps API 3

CHAPTER 3 ■ CREATING YOUR FIRST MAP
My first map
The Doctype
At the very top of the web page there’s a doctype declaration:
This is used to tell the browser how to interpret the page. If you don’t have a correct doctype, the
browser will immediately go into quirks mode. Be sure to get this right! I’ve never been able to learn it by
heart, so I usually copy and paste it from existing pages. The good news if you’re using HTML 5 is that
the doctype is simply as follows:
I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to completely memorize this one.
The
The section of the page contains a few important elements. First there’s the title, which sets the
title of the page, and then there’s a meta element, which tells what kind of character encoding you’re
using. This element is necessary for the document to be valid! I recommend using UTF-8 since it
includes special characters for all languages.
My first Google Map
■ Tip To learn more about character encoding, which is a whole science in itself, read the article “The Absolute
Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No
Excuses!)” by Joel Spolsky at www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html.
The
Finally, the element contains the elements that will be visible on the web page. In this example
case, you’re not going to have a lot of stuff here. But you will have a heading () and a element.
The element will eventually contain the map and will have the attribute id="map". This is
important, because it’s through this ID that you will target this element, both from your style sheet and
from your JavaScript. You’ll learn more about this later in the chapter.
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