#
Amsterdam

##
The 2000 Map

We start our final chapter on MapClient's advanced properties with a recent map from Amsterdam, together with an extended menu
. It is the usual sort of ugly map you find on the Internet. Three levels of detail become visible as you zoom in: general, which only shows the most important details (including highway exits)
, intermediate, which only shows the main street names (you can see the three main Golden Age canals: Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht)
, and the most detailed level, with some more streetnames, here shown around Dam Square
. Please note the horrible typography.
The first advanced feature of MapClient is the movable reference map, shown here with the medieval city extent
. Reference maps are a very common part of MapServer; in MapClient they can be put in a menu and moved around, like in this second picture with the 17th century city extensions, the famous "half moon"
.
Actually, every HTML element can be put into a menu and made visible/invisible at will from a parent menu. This comes in very handy in the restricted space available on a computer screen. As an example I put all streetnames in a scrollable <SPAN> element and put that in a menu Every street has its coordinates associated with it and a click event that will zoom the map to the appropriate region
.
The same goes for windows. Any HTML element of combination of elements can be put in a window, so as to be moved, resized or minimized. Here you see a picture of the Central Station with the accompanying map
. It was built at the end of the 19th century in the river IJ, and closed Amsterdam off from the water. This
is what the water front looked like in the 17th century, viewed from about the later Central Station.