Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Google Maps and XSL

8th February 2005

I’ll probably write more on this later, but it seems that Google Maps is using XSL. I spotted it loading the following pages while sniffing its activity with LiveHTTPHeaders:

This is in addition to the (now expected) XMLHttpRequest stuff. There even appears to be some of Microsoft’s weird VML, although as I’m on a Mac I don’t have access to IE/Windows to see what it’s doing with it.

The bulk of the Google Maps JavaScript appears to be hidden away in maps.1.js, which becomes a lot more readable if you feed it through PrettyPrinter.de

As for Google Maps itself, it’s an amazing piece of work but it’s a shame they didn’t follow map.search.ch’s lead in degrading gracefully to a static version for unsupported browsers.

If anyone has any further insights in to how it all works, please post them in a comment.

This is Google Maps and XSL by Simon Willison, posted on 8th February 2005.

Next: Do Content Management Systems really work?

Previous: Don't build web apps that only work in IE

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2005/02/08/maps