D3 just exposes SVG directly to you. But with county maps specifically, you can compress and simplify the data with TopoJSON and use d3.geo to render it. d3.geo

D3 just exposes SVG directly to you. But with county maps specifically, you can compress and simplify the data with TopoJSON and use d3.geo to render it. d3.geo even has a canvas renderer and many projections to choose from. And since it's d3, you can do data-driven transitions between different datasets and projections. I bet you haven't seen anything like this in Raphael. http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/transition/ http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/transition/