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map.search.ch

Forget about Google Suggest; if you want to see some really impressive dynamic web content go and have a play with map.search.ch. It uses XMLHttpRequest and a bunch of other tricks to let you smoothly pan and zoom over an enormous and detailed map of Switzerland, based on satelite photos (so you can zoom right in to individual streets and see the houses). Even better, it supports hackable URLs letting you link directly to cities or even street addresses.

The dynamic map resizes with your browser window, and the whole lot works in pretty much every modern browser (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Konqueror) and degrades to a static version for everything else.

It launched back in October but I hadn’t heard anything about it until Harry tipped me off. 2005 is going to be an exciting year.

Posted 5th January 2005 at 9:44 pm

This is map.search.ch by Simon Willison, posted on 5th January 2005.

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15 comments

  1. Very nice. This one uses Flash, I believe, instead of the XML/HTTP object, but it's equally nice. I can even zoom right in on my house. Booyah! http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/listings-search

    Mike D. - 5th January 2005 22:09 - #

  2. That's dope. Awesome technology demonstration. However, I do think this would be better suited for flash. (Like the redfin site demonstrates) Very cool though. I'll be taking some pointers from it for sure. Can't believe it got no buzz :(

    Adam Michela - 5th January 2005 22:40 - #

  3. Absolutely amazing.

    Simon, when are you coming back to Kansas so we can develop something like this in a local-news context?

    Adrian Holovaty - 5th January 2005 23:37 - #

  4. f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c. I think that this year we will see more and more exciting examples of DOM. Thanks for the URL Simon.

    juque - 5th January 2005 23:53 - #

  5. Manual pingback.

    Phil Boardman - 6th January 2005 02:29 - #

  6. Off-topic, but URL stands for the Universal Republic of Love??

    Jim D. - 6th January 2005 14:20 - #

  7. Jim D: see Tim Bray's proposal.

    Simon Willison - 6th January 2005 14:25 - #

  8. I'm really liking the XmlHTTPRequest stuff. I'm definitely going to have to use it in some up coming apps I build.

    Frank Wiles - 6th January 2005 16:29 - #

  9. manual pingback (your entry made me finally post about XmlHTTPRequest.)

    helge - 7th January 2005 00:02 - #

  10. I think that XMLHTTPRequest (and the building momentum) will give birth to a new set of stateful client-side frameworks. Windowing, XML-RPC/REST/SOAP stacks, etc.

    That, in turn, will provide a totally different way of creating apps on the web. It'll lower the bar on making rich clients with zero deployment.

    Is that a good thing? I don't know; I definitely see accessibility suffering. When the state of an application is not totally represented as a URL, the webbiness suffers.

    But in terms of application development, its be exciting. Who needs XUL or XAML when you have XMLHTTPRequest and an in-browser cross-platform zero deployment framework?

    Let the iterations begin.

    Jeremy Dunck - 7th January 2005 00:08 - #

  11. helge: nice write-up. Just one minor correction - a9.com uses an iframe trick rather than XMLHttpRequest, although the end effect is identical.

    Simon Willison - 7th January 2005 00:37 - #

  12. thanks simon, i'll correct that.

    helge - 7th January 2005 15:06 - #

  13. Actually, map.search.ch doesn't use XMLHttpRequest either, it turns out. http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml _05/comments/#c010497 Doesn't make it any less impressive though.

    Dave S. - 7th January 2005 15:42 - #

  14. Not dynamic, but superior aerial photos:
    http://terraserver.microsoft.com/

    tom sherman - 11th January 2005 00:13 - #

  15. If you are interested I started playing with the XMLHttp object to process some OPML/RSS files. http://members.home.nl/cybarber/OPMLXMLHttp.htm

    Cybarber - 23rd January 2005 19:49 - #

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