TopoJSON
Last week I updated Shape Escape to convert shapefiles to GeoJSON and TopoJSON , in the hopes of making it easier for developers to quickly get that web-unfriendly shapefile into some clientside useful vector format. First, it's worth noting that TopoJSON has got a bunch of webmap folks excited. And rightfully so. Many people seem excited because topology (although I haven't seen many non-demo sites taking advantage of this yet). And also because it advertises a more compact representation of data. Clearly if the topology it makes available will help your visualization, TopoJSON is the way to go. But what's this about a smaller representation? As noted on the wiki page , 'TopoJSON can also be more efficient to render since shared control points need only be projected once. To further reduce file size, TopoJSON uses fixed-precision delta-encoding for integer coordinates rather than floats. This eliminates the need to round the precision of coordinate values