"Vectors are your friend"

HTML5 Canvas was a natural extension for giscloud.com:  Its distinction is to post vectors on the web, overlaying rasters like any GIS, and with a optional postGIS running in the background. Not only does this speed up drawing maps on the web, it also allows massive amounts - in the millions of points, lines and polygons - to render PDQ (pretty darn quickly) - thus Vectors are your friend - my moderately complex maps benefit from even clean&crisper renderings of polygons as expected and of tiled images especially.

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This is my old Medieval Fenlands map in East Anglia with 10 layers at 2000 polygons each and two web mapping services - zoom in an out to appreciate its speed.

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Here's the Goddard Space Flight Center's AIRS NRT imagery web mapping services to show raster tiling, zoom in to see it better. It's also the basis of this blog's banner map in arcgis.com.

@giscloud is still new so there is a way to go yet - as some of the tweets that increased 1500% in the last few days indicate - labelling, scale dependency, layers and legends, etc. Note also that as this relies on HTML5: pre-rel. 9 Internet Explorer that don't support it will automatically revert maps to their original rendition.

Fifteen years ago Argus' distinction from ArcView and Mapinfo was to render in less than 5 s. all 50 US states and 3000+ county polygons. And about that time Hipparchus claimed to map the solar system at metric scale... One could say that:

What goes around, goes around, goes around again,
da-na-na da-na-na da-na-na my friend say
Where you gonna run to? When it gonna end?