During yesterday’s meeting with your team leaders and programmers, several people asked me whether I could share a template for what I considered to be a perfectly formatted placemark. There’s unfortunately no easy way for me to upload a KMZ file to either this website or to Google Docs, but I’ll e-mail all of you a copy of the “Road to Cathay” file, which contains many excellent examples.
Meanwhile, here are some screen shots that should help you out. The first shows the “Kashmir” placemark, which I think does a great job with textual sources. Note that the person who wrote this paid equal attention to Marco Polo and the contemporary situation in Kashmir and incorporated these two parts into a fluid piece of prose, rather than just juxtaposing quotations. The bibliography is professionally formatted and doesn’t require me to click through to another page.
The second screen shot shows the source code that was used to create this placemark.
The only problem with “Kashmir” is that it does not contain an image. The last screenshot, of the “Wakhan” placemark, shows how to properly work with pictures. The file has been resized to an appropriate dimension, and it has been attributed to the original creator who placed it in the public domain via Flickr.