The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

Yesterday we rolled out some new functionality for WALS Online. Most notable:

• Geographic coordinates are now displayed on language pages (e.g. Quiché).
• Custom icon selections on feature values pages are now stored in cookies in the user's browser. This allows retrieving the last selection even when navigating to a values page using the browser's back button. A link above the icon size control allows resetting custom selections to the defaults.
• A special css style for print should make the experience of printing maps from WALS Online a lot better. Let us know about the results on various platforms.
• Author names are now linked to the corresponding entry in the authors page, which we hope to enrich with information over time.

Less notable - in the sense of harder to notice:

• Most pages are now XHTML 1.0, which allows us to include ...
• ... metadata in RDFa. We haven't included a lot of metadata yet - mainly because of the experimental nature of the whole mechanism, so we'd like to hear whether this is already useful by now.
• GeoRSS for feature values; the datapoints for each value of a feature are syndicated as GeoRSS feeds, which - among other things - allows to easily include them as layers in an OpenLayers application. We have put together an example of such an integration. (Note that the pages under "experimental" may not be stable.)