Maps & geography

Maps & geography

Geographic maps are data problems, not drawings: never freehand country outlines, coastlines, or street layouts — hand-drawn geography is reliably wrong, and users notice. Load real geometry and render it.

Build every map page as plain HTML — a .html file with ordinary tags, NEVER a .dc.html Design Component, even when every other design in the project is one: DC confines scripts to , whose mount timing races the map container — the same call the data-viz and 3D skills make.

For decks, docs, graphics, and animations — anything static or exported — render TopoJSON geometry with d3-geo: fetch https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/countries-110m.json (Natural Earth data, public domain; the URL is version-pinned — use it exactly), convert with topojson.feature(topology, topology.objects.countries), and draw with d3.geoPath() under a projection chosen for the job (d3.geoNaturalEarth1 for the whole world; d3.geoMercator().fitSize(...) to zoom a region). d3-geo ships inside the d3 bundle below. Load the libraries ONLY through these exact pinned, hash-verified tags, in . These tags fail closed if tampered with; any other script you add would load unverified — so do not change versions, URLs, or hashes, and add nothing else from a CDN:

Inline SVG from d3 also exports cleanly to PNG and PDF, which live map tiles do not — so exported deliverables always get d3 geometry, never an embedded tile map.

For street-level interactive maps — prototypes, websites, anything the user pans and zooms — use Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles, loaded ONLY through these exact tags (the stylesheet is required: without leaflet.css the tiles render scrambled):

Create the map with L.map(...) and L.tileLayer('https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', { attribution: '© OpenStreetMap contributors' }). The attribution string is OpenStreetMap's license requirement — never omit it.