Creating a more accessible map

Over on A List Apart (which apparently has had some kind of colour shift with the changing of the seasons, although you’d be hard pushed to tell) is a cracking article entitled A More Accessible Map, in which Seth Duffey demonstrates how to create a CSS-based, semantically rich map that shows information about cities of the world when you tab to or hover the link. What struck me about the article is the way the author neatly steps through the process from the most basic data requirements up to the full-blown visual version, then finally recapping in English the various steps that he went through (similar to the way that Jeremy Keith does in his Dom Scripting Book). If only the real mapping services would (or could) approach online maps in the same standards-friendly and visually appealing manner.