This brief tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of the Google Charts API, but no knowledge of the new map chart type. This tutorial will cover all of the required and optional Charts API parameters for the map chart type and will culminate in displaying a US map of red states and blue states.

Producing the base map

To produce our base map using the Google Charts API requires a URL similar to the following one:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x200&cht=t&chtm=usa&chd=s:_

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The latest version of the Google Charts API released 18 March 2008 includes thematic maps and our old Tufte favorite, sparklines!

Hopefully, I'll have a chance to play around with them this weekend(!) and put together a more substantial post then.

As promised at last night's NY Web Standards meetup, this morning I tested to see if IE 8 would recognize IE 7 conditional comments when set to render in IE 7 standards mode. The unfortunate answer is no. You can review the test here: http://themechanism.com/barkode/demos-tutorials/ie8-version-targeting.php

Aside—I installed Safari 3.1 (525.13) on my PC (Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1) this morning and, for the first time in months, it runs!

Sorry for posting two Chris Heilmann reblogs in such short succession (I know, I know, like a poor man's RSS reader), but not only is his stuff so good, I wanted to reference this in tonight's NY Web Standards meetup.

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From "The struggle for web standards—my presentation for Coder's Saturday in Montreal" on Wait till I come! by Chris Heilmann, published on 22 March 2008 at 7:24 PM.

In anticipation of tonight's NY Web Standards meetup, I present this trenchant criticism from Joel Spolsky on Microsoft's decision to not make IE8 behave like IE7 by default:

The idealists rejoiced. Hundreds of them descended on the IE blog to actually say nice things about Microsoft for the first times in their lives.

I looked at my watch.

Tick, tick, tick.

Within a matter of seconds, you started to see people on the forums showing up like this one:

I have downloaded IE 8 and with it some bugs. Some of my websites like "HP" are very difficult to read as the whole page is very very small… The speed of my Internet has also been reduced on some occasions. Whe [sic] I use Google Maps, there are overlays everywhere, enough so it makes it ackward [sic] to use!

Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She's your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, "It has bugs and I can't see my sites." They don't give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic "standard" that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don't want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.

From "Martian Headsets" on Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky, my favorite new blog on software development and the internet. So far, I find everything on here very well-written, reasoned, and developed into coherent essays (long is good!)

Chris Heilmann deals with the topic of how following web standards helps your team to be more successful:

From Wait Till I Come. Slides available on Chris's site.

John Resig hosted a panel discussion on the "Secrets of JavaScript Libraries" yesterday. The slides are here and the original post is on John's blog at http://ejohn.org/blog/secrets-of-javascript-libraries-sxsw/.

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From Surfin' Safari:

For those of you using the star seven CSS hack to target current or older versions of WebKit, this parsing bug has been closed in the latest WebKit nightlies. Acid3 specifically tests for this, so any browser that wants to be compliant with Acid3 will have to fix this CSS parsing bug.

For more information about this hack, see:
http://diveintomark.org/projects/csshacks/star7.html

From an informative post to the IEBlog on IE 8's layout modes and how/when they're invoked.

As you may have heard by now, Internet Explorer 8 will ship with three layout modes—Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. The saying goes: "put your best face forward" and, true to this, Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default when encountering standards content. The behavior looks as follows:

To invoke IE8's IE7 Standards layout mode, it will be necessary to "opt-out" of the default layout modes (see above table) by using the following <meta> tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

Note—The <meta> tag declaration will always override the DOCTYPE.

Learn more at my 27 March 2008 presentation on version targeting and IE 8.

• IEBlog—The Default Layout Mode
• Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!—Jeffrey Zeldman
• A List Apart No. 253—IE8 and version targeting
• MSDN article on DOCTYPEs

The uproar over IE 8 and version targeting may be over—according to 456 Berea Street "Microsoft has reversed its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested."

It seems that Microsoft actually responded to developer outcry and reversed its earlier decision—now, to get IE8 to render as IE 7, one must opt in using version targeting. Wow!

If you're not sure what this is all about, you're in the New York area, and you want to find out, come to my 27 March 2008 presentation on version targeting and IE 8 (plug, plug!).