google maps escapes into the wild

Unless you've been living under a "virtual" rock for the last 48 hours, you've probably heard about the new Google Maps. Google's first foray into Web-based maps vastly improves upon the clunky full-page loading interactions found on Mapquest and Yahoo. The images are dynamically loaded into an IFRAME and the map data is sent across as XML and rendered using a combo of XML, JavaScript, and XSLT. I especially love the smooth free zooming as opposed to North/South/etc. buttons and zoom-to-point.

People are already deconstructing Google Maps. If you're interested in seeing how it all works, take a look at this blog post.

Update: It looks like you can append '&output=xml' to any of the Google Maps URLs to see the XML that's generated for that map request. Cool!