A map is a picture.
Make it like one

No, and the difference is the point. A GIS thinks in layers, coordinate systems and analysis; this thinks shape, data, extrude, style, label, export. There are no streets, no satellite imagery, no geocoding and no spatial analysis, and there will not be — competing with QGIS would make it worse at the one thing it is for, which is getting a map into a design.

Natural Earth, which is public domain, at 1:110m and 1:50m. Both ship with the page rather than being fetched from a tile server: the map has to draw on the first frame, and a service that phoned a third party for its own geometry would tell that third party which countries you were looking at.

Equal Earth for anything with a figure attached, because it is equal-area: the same amount of land takes the same amount of room. Mercator does not — it makes Greenland the size of Africa — so a choropleth drawn on it says the wrong thing before the colours are even chosen. Natural Earth is neither, and is there for when a map just has to look like a world map.

Germany, Deutschland, Allemagne, DE, DEU and 276 all resolve to one country, in eighteen languages, and a swapped pair of letters is forgiven. The names come from the browser's own knowledge rather than a table here, so they are current: Turkey became Türkiye in 2022 and the browser knows it. Anything it cannot place is listed rather than dropped.

Because two countries share one border. In the data it is a single line that both refer to, which is why the world fits in a hundred kilobytes — and it means there is nothing between them to move apart. Each shape is drawn back from its own middle by half the gap instead, so the two halves meet as the space asked for. It also cannot turn a narrow country inside out, which a true polygon inset does.

Yes, and the ramps are there because most maps should not. A quantity wants one hue running light to dark; a difference wants two hues through a neutral middle. A rainbow ramp has no order in it — nobody can say whether green is more than orange — so none is offered.

The flat map: one path per country, the labels as live text or as outlines, the legend beside them, at the size of the canvas. SVG and PDF both. A standing map cannot be vector — a bevelled solid is not something the format describes — so that one leaves as a picture or as GLB, and the export panel says so rather than quietly handing back a flat map.

Opening the map in Blender, Cinema 4D or anything else that reads glTF. The countries come across as solids with their colours; the lights and the ground stay here, because you will want your own.

Natural Earth draws a country as the state, not as the part of the world it sits in — France carries French Guiana, Portugal the Azores, Norway Svalbard. Fitting to the outermost point would stretch Europe from South America to the Arctic, so anything smaller than the world fits to the bulk of the land and lets the far islets run off the edge. That is what a printed atlas does too, and why it puts the Azores in an inset.

You can, and you usually should not. Labels go to the territories that carry a figure or have been picked out; a label sits inside its country when it fits and goes to the margin with a line back when it does not, and the ones in the margin are spread so that none covers another.

No. The paste is read, matched and drawn in your browser, and the file is written there too. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

Administrative regions — states, provinces, districts — and the layers that sit on top of a map rather than in it: markers, routes, connection lines, bubbles and insets. The country level and the data behind it came first because that is what most of this work actually needs.

Because nothing this makes is a sheet of paper. A map from here goes into a deck, a page layout or a browser, and all three ask how many pixels across — so the canvas is stated in pixels and the export multiplies it for a retina copy. PDF is the one format that wants a physical size, and it reads the canvas at 96 pixels to the inch, which is exactly what a browser does when it prints.