Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Embedding SVG

SVG is a graphic presented in text. It is possible to embed SVG in any site that allows you to post large blocks of HTML. This post tests this idea. This is a map of Arizona embedded in this blog post. If your browser supports SVG, you will see a map of the counties of Arizona. If not, you see something strange in a 500x584px box.

Gila Apache Navajo Cochise Coconino Yuma Mohave Yavapai Pinal Pima (Tucson) Maricopa (Phoenix) Greenlee La Paz Graham Santa Cruz Shape files from Wikicommons which were derived from TIGER

Monday, February 10, 2014

SVG Maps

I want to start including advanced features from HTML 5 in my web projects. I am interested in using SVG for graphing and mapping applications; So, I just added an SVG map of Arizona Counties to the front page of Arizona Color. Unfortunately, older browsers such as internet explorer 8 do not render SVG; so I put the graph below the fold.

SVG is a human readable and editable file format. This means one can build graphs from very simple shape files and manipulate them on the fly. For this graph, I copied the shape files from a public domain document on Wikipedia. The data for the file came from the US Census Bureau's TIGER project. So, the next step is to decipher the TIGER Data. Unfortunately, while the TIGER data is public domain, it is stored in a proprietary format.

Anyway: Here is the map.