the world in xhtml/css

June 8th, 2011 § Comments Off on the world in xhtml/css § permalink

World map showing countries which have adopted...

Image via Wikipedia

Every now and then I have to code something to see if i still remember. also lately i’ve become very passionate about infographics and tools that make it easy to visualize large datasets. Gapminder‘s bubbles are great, google maps can be great, but i feel they are also to heavy for some use cases.

incidentally I was browsing trough an old encyclopedia and saw a great simplified map of the world assembled from squares and rectangles in place of countries. so i thought i’d try coding a world map in pure xhtml/css, using colored div elements. it’s pretty easy actually. check out lightweight map of the world.

 

i took data about central points, width and length of all countries from CIA world factbook, calculated screen pixels from coordinates, and consider length correction towards the poles. the output is not w3c valid yet, but it’s not far from it 🙂 if anyone is interested in the script leave the comment or ping me…

i was pretty disappointed by wikipedia and freebase; they are both non-comprehensive, which is a serious problem for visualizations.

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