Mapping Hacks

Plot Points on a Spinning Globe Applet #40

Chapter 4, Mapping (on) the Web

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HACK

Load the web page, and you should see a shiny blue marble with white

coastlines on a white background. You can drag with your mouse to spin it

about.

Pretty, but not interesting for very long. To make it more interesting, you

can do one (or both) of two things:

• Tack some pinpoints on it that are tied to URLs.

• Use it for coordinate input: for example, to input latitude/longitude

coordinates into a web form.

Display and Interact with Points on the Geosphere

To tack on some pinpoints, you need to define them in an XML file and

then tell the applet to load them from the file.

Create an XML file in this format:

<geosphere>

<group name="" title="" color="" on=""/>

<site group="" latitude="" longitude="" href="">name</site>

</geosphere>

The XML file has following specifications:

• The

<site> tag specifies a pinpoint that may belong to a group, which is

specified by a

<group> tag. The site tag is associated with its correspond-

ing group by using the same name specified in the

<group name=""> as

the value for the

<site group=""> attribute.

• You can have zero or more

<group> tags. If you have zero, then you can

of course omit the

group="" attribute in the <site> tag.

• The

<group on=""> attribute determines whether this group of locations

is initially displayed on the globe.

• The

<site href=""> attribute is the URL that the pinpoint ...