Nice thread guys. In terms of a couple of other alternative mapping libraries, I can point towards a couple in addition to Polymaps. By alternative I guess I

Nice thread guys. In terms of a couple of other alternative mapping libraries, I can point towards a couple in addition to Polymaps. By alternative I guess I mean something that is not currently ready for mainstream consumption - unapologetic disregard for no IE6 (nor IE7 or IE8 in reality) support or attempting to support browsers that aren't adopting forward thinking standards such as SVG / HTML5. I will preface this by saying I am actually pulling one of these together so I might be a little biased in how cool I think tech like this is (Polymaps included). First off you have a library called Cartagen (http://cartagen.org/ http://cartagen.org/) which is a very ambitious project indeed and does move towards what simon below suggested in terms of actually rendering without the need for image tiles. Well worth a look. Next, you have the project I have been working on (opensource, MIT licensed, etc) which I have called Tile5 (http://tile5.org/ http://tile5.org/). In terms of GIS feature completeness, it really doesn't compare with the Polymaps or more mature technologies such as OpenLayers - yet. My focus has been to date to create a really nice feeling library for web mapping (mobile touch support, inertial scrolling, easing animations, etc) as my goal was to compete with native maps on mobile - ambitious, I know. I'd certainly welcome feedback and input regarding Tile5, but would also recommend checking out Cartagen as well to see what else is possible using the likes of Canvas and SVG. Happy to talk more about this, but obviously don't want to spam the thread.