Exploring Questions within the Maps for HTML Community Group Over the past year, we have been revisiting the Hyper-Layering Architecture (HLA) within the W3C, in the context of ongoing discussions about making maps a first-class citizen of the Web. Hyper-Layering … Continue reading
Want to shape the future of HTML? The State of HTML 2025 survey is live – and it includes a question about MapML and mapping on the web! This survey directly influences which web platform features get prioritized by browser … Continue reading
Scripting, Styling and Web Maps: Who’s On First? The Big Three Part of the job of being a Web standard means that you have to follow the architecture of the web, which allocates specific jobs across the Big Three languages: … Continue reading
Ed Freyfogle, leader of the OpenCage geocoding service, and Peter Rushforth had a chat about the Maps for HTML community and our goals. You can listen to their conversation here, please leave comments below.
The Maps for HTML community development has been happening “seasonally” for a few years now, driven in large measure by student internships. We have had excellent experiences with the co-op programs of the University of Waterloo, and Ottawa University here … Continue reading
Web Semantics1 TL;DR: “machines” use the HTML structure of Web pages to enable the coherent transmission of the document content’s meaning to the user. Maps and locations are not currently reflected in HTML’s structure, nor browser rendering engines, and so … Continue reading
This post is a bit of catch up for several months of activity. I hope it summarizes most of what we’ve worked on since about the beginning of October 2020, just after our successful workshop. If you see that I’ve … Continue reading
As an active developer of the OpenLayers mapping library, I have been working a lot on performance improvements in the rendering pipeline. Performance is usually good, but there are corner cases where the user experience is negatively affected by an unresponsive user interface. There is a new browser technology, OffscreenCanvas, which allows rendering in web workers that run in parallel to the main thread. Unfortunately it is not widely supported in mainstream browsers. In this post, I am going to show how rendering performance in OpenLayers could benefit from OffscreenCanvas. Continue reading
So, the big idea is this: MapML resolves the Web Platform gap by combining map and map data semantics into a hypermedia format that is syntactically and architecturally compatible with and derived from HTML. MapML provides a standardized way for … Continue reading
