How do draw polygons which can be used with OpenLayers?

Question

I can draw custom shapes using polygons in Inkscape. My goal is to display these shapes on top of the map of the US at fixed positions. The map and the polygons will display on a webpage with the ability to zoom in and out and pan. I wanted to know if these polygons can be placed on such a map using OpenLayers. How? Example anywhere? I am not familiar enough with OpenLayers and would learn it more if it can meet my requirements. I need to programmatically be able to color fill each shape either server or client side. I also want to place markers on the map based on lon/lat coordinates. Does OpenLayers support all this?

This is an example of what I want to do. The area in orange was defined in Inkscape and the color orange can be a different color set programmatically. This is a simple svg file displayed on the web page.

Answer 1

You should be able to treat the exported SVG as a regular image overlay. Here is the OpenLayers API for image overlays and here is another SO answer with a very basic image overlay example. OpenLayers supports markers, though if you're embedding the SVG as a flat image, I'm not sure if OpenLayers will allow you to style the SVG elements out of the box...

As an aside, Polymaps is an alternative mapping library that's slightly more SVG-oriented; it's especially good for stuff like dynamically transforming SVG layers based on data, manipulating styles and classes for SVG elements, etc. Per your example, here's their example for very simply throwing an image (with defined top-right / bottom-left coordinates) on a map.