Lots of people have been noticing cool things about Google Maps: large and readable maps, image dragging, dynamic updating, integration with local search, clean URLs for bookmarking, local XSLT processing, transparent PNGs. Then, today, somebody1 this article pointed out something that just knocked my socks off. You can append "output=xml" to any Google Maps URL and receive raw XML. Here's a trivial use of that feature:
This form sources a script that calls the W3C's XSLT processor, passing it an XSLT stylesheet and a Google Maps query. Of course this is only a reformulation of the same info that Google's service gives you just as fast and in a far richer context. But when you look at how longitude and latitude coordinates are threaded through the XML documents that Google Maps emits, wow. It looks like all kinds of amazing integration is not only possible, but easy.
1 Lost the link, if somebody finds it I'll use it. Thanks, Alan. See also: slashdot.
Update: Andrew Baio at waxy.org notes: "the applications of this are endless, but what are the terms of service?" Good question. Access to basic Google search is gated by the APIs and restricted to registered developers whose programs present keys. I'd expect that Google Maps will work in a similar way, and if I need to take down this little demo I will, but it sure is a tantalizing glimpse of how things might be. The title of this item, by the way, echoes this brief report and movie clip from Adam Bosworth's XML 2003 keynote.
Update: The party's over, at least for now. The "output=xml" option is disabled, though you'll find the same slug of XML embedded inside the JavaScript responses.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/09.html#a1172