Index to group projects and resources
The Maps for HTML community group is working to standardize methods of defining interactive geographic maps for websites. The community group is hosted by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and is open to anyone who is interested in maps and web standards.
For more information, consult:
Includes a blog (infrequently updated), along with other information such as links to the group's draft reports, links to the group's mailing list, social media, and forums, and lists of current participants and chairs.
Most importantly of all, this is where you join the group! Look for the “Get involved” heading and the “Join this group” link. You'll need to create a W3C website account, and accept the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement. If you have an employer with rights to work you create, they may need to join on your behalf.
With details on the process and legal/intellectual property requirements for community group participation.
Contains a history of notices and discussion. However, most discussion happens within the GitHub project repositories.
Most work by the group can be found here (including this web page).
The Maps for HTML Community Group has a channel on YouTube.
The group is currently working on three reports (which are all drafts and subject to change):
An overview of why HTML needs a built-in map viewer element, which can combine multiple layers into an interactive view.
A proposal for how the HTML map viewer and layer elements could be defined.
A proposal for a new document format for describing maps (MapML), which could contain a mix of tiled images, vector features (e.g., points, lines, polygons), and hyperlinks to related resources. MapML documents could be used as layers in an HTML map viewer.
The following projects (hosted by the community group's GitHub account) make it possible to experiment with the proposed specifications:
A polyfill of the MapML proposal, as a set of HTML custom elements, using Leaflet as the map rendering engine.
A GeoServer module that enables MapML output, supporting images, features and tiles. There is basic documentation available, as well as instructions on how to install the module.
An experimental / work in progress fork of the validator.nu project which validates MapML documents. The objective is to validate HTML including map markup as well as independent text/mapml documents.
An experimental / work in progress fork of the validator.nu HTML parser
Websites that use the custom element and MapML server, hosted by Natural Resources Canada.
Interactive map viewers, with maps on various subjects and in various projections, including arctic views (not supported by most web map tiling systems).
This is an HTML document containing map markup inline, representing vector data according to the MapML <feature> proposal.
The following standards may be of relevance to maps in HTML:
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) publishes standards for map-related data, some of which are used or adapted by MapML:
IETF standard RFC 7946 is a standardized representation of vector feature data in JSON structure.
IETF RFC RFC 5870 is a URI scheme allowing WGS 84 locations to be conveyed in URLs conforming to a specified URI scheme.
The following related projects aren't controlled or published by the community group, but may be of interest:
These reports were prepared by the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group (now Interest Group), a joint project of the OGC and W3C. Some of the recommendations are relevant to map viewers and map data servers.
An open source JavaScript library for building custom Web maps.
An open source JavaScript library for building custom Web maps.
An alternative to MapML for standardizing interactive web maps, building on the ability of SVG to mix image tiles with vector features and hyperlinks.
See the related proposals for standardizing key new SVG features: SVG Tiling and Layering Module (proposal) and SVG globalView proposal