I like the idea of styling a map properly with CSS. I love the sheer WTF factor.

The fact we're seeing fonts (ab)used in this manner (and for icon fonts) says that we're sorely missing a good technical solution.

Amazing indeed. So what is this font abuse really getting at? It's a means to introduce semantic information into vector graphics. Defining the semantics of a state, its shape and name, allows us to treat the state as an abstraction that can have formatting applied to it.

So how did web fonts end up as the approach? Because that's where browsers first acquired the notion of confluencing semantics and vector graphics. Fonts demand all the advantages of those entities: semantic information to define characters suitable for mapping to glyphs, the ability to apply styling to those glyphs (bold/italic/etc), and raster-independent scalability.

Could SVG do something like this, include semantic hooks in a file for applying styles? (I'm not too familiar with the format.)

I'm not sure if I'm missing something in the question, but SVG plays very nicely with CSS. I frequently download SVG map files from Wikipedia, add new, more suitable, IDs to the relevant <path> elements, and then add a CSS section at the top for shading individual countries or regions or whatever.

The complex part is usually simply working out which country/region/whatever corresponds to which <path> in the first place; but this is a complaint more about the quality of the markup of the underlying SVG of an average map on Wikipedia, than about SVG itself.

Great info. The missing part is educating web developers that this is even possible. The thought that SVG can accept CSS styles never occurred to me until this thread and your answer. And I can hardly be the only such ill-informed web developer in the world.

So we do have a good technical solution for what this submission is doing with the web font, as the top post asks. SVG with CSS would be a more proper way of expressing a styleable vectorized map of states. (But the web font is still an exceedingly clever hack, and grabs attention in a way that a boring old SVG tutorial wouldn't.)

Yes. For an example, compare the underlying XML of http://globestroller.com/maps/US_48.svg with the original at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Blank_US_...

In the original the states already had IDs (except, for some reason, Virginia), so it was simply a matter of moving the inline styling to a CSS section at the top.

The CSS can also be in a different file, which could be dynamically generated for different users if you wanted to build a simple "make a pretty map of which states you've visisted" app.

Wikipedia (technically Wikimedia Commons, or whatever it's called) has lots of maps in SVG. I've used those before.

http://kartograph.org/ (and other such libs) exists, but I'm not sure it's as "designer-friendly" as a pure CSS solution, despite being able to style them in your stylesheet all the same.

There's CSS-inspired map styling language for OpenStreetMap:http://www.mapcss.org/

You'll all regret adding -ly to anything eventually. Still really awesome, can't wait to see the rest of the world.

Seeing as stately is a real word this will never matter for this specific case.

Wellly that’s justly your opinionly.

Does Flickr regret dropping a vowel in its name? There have been lots of naming trends and they don't seem to have had much effect on long-term success. What's wrong with -ly?

It's not a bad thing at all. Flickr works because it is still pronounced Flicker. Personally anything with -ly irks me the wrong way and it feels like a branding cop-out at times. Just imagine if Google was called Searchly or if Basecamp was named Managely. From a branding perspective in 5-10 years time adding -ly will look dated. You'll think back to web 2.0 as if you were looking at a geocities page (or worse Homestead). Not to say this project should be aware of its branding at all.

I have to say Improvely looks solid by the way.

I think the general case is that it might have been innovative for one name, but the rest sound derivative, unoriginal, repetitive, derivative, unoriginal and repetitive. And many abuse the Lybian TLD.

Hear hear. It sounds ridiculous.

Hm, why can't this be done with simply using SVG instead of using fonts in such manner?

It can, but not every browser supports SVG sadly. :( This however, works in IE8

I see. But I think it's not a preferable solution if one wants to support crippled browsers like IE <= 8. But it's an interesting proof of concept still. Some approach like Raphaël JS is probably better for such cases. Or one just needs to ignore any crippled browsers, which might not be ideal.

Surely it's relatively easy to convert SVG to, say, .jpg on the fly, though, no? </handwave>

What about old fashioned https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/map and area tag? They are built specifically for this.

That can be a huge mess, though, if you need to do a lot of dynamic color changing of specific states and/or groups of states.

I love the idea, but they've made an odd choice in the way they've styled the page: I can't scroll down to read all the text. Page scrolling is jerky and the text disappears for me before I reach the bottom of the text. I had to inspect the page source to finish reading "How does it work?"

What browser/OS? Working fine on Chrome stable/Mac 10.8

I was also using chrome stable, Mac OS 10.8. The left column doesn't disappear when I scroll down in Firefox (although also much more jumpy than I'm used to). But, I guess it seems to only affect me. I do have a retina display and they are using javascript to serve me retina images, which might have something to do with it.

Stateface is another good font if you'd simply like images of the individual states. https://github.com/propublica/stateface

It doesn't display the entire map like this (so the use case is different), but it's pretty cool all the same.

Wow. very cool. But that 3d-rotation on the hero graphic gives me a little vertigo -- it's almost too good :-)

This is great, but I'm really looking forward to support for animated fonts in Firefox.

The return of the blink tag?

Looks like Washington and Maine get cut off at the top!