I’ve been playing around with the Google Maps API recently as I attempt to write an article on its usage. Right off the bat, I found a problem.

All of the pages on my site are served up as proper XHTML, including the XML prolog and serving the pages up as application/xhtml+xml in Firefox. Apparently, this causes the Google Maps API fits because it wants to use document.write(), which doesn’t exist in the XHTML DOM.

A quick search through the Google Maps API Group reveals no answer other than, “remove the XML declaration and don’t serve up your page as application/xhtml+xml.” What? You’ve got to be kidding me. This seems to be a major oversight of the Google Maps API team, to use a feature that is deprecated. All of the examples provided use the strict XHTML but we’re not actually supposed to have valid strict XHTML? I hope someone is looking into fixing this.