Google Maps vs. static image maps

Which would you rather offer your site's visitors?

[Epibeta]

I'm planning on adding 6 or 7 maps to my website that point my users to local businesses, event locations, etc. I'm considering using links to Google Maps as opposed to using .jpeg images and I'm having a bit of a tough time making up my mind.

From a compatibility standpoint, more users would be able to view the .jpeg maps, right? Google maps seems to have pretty excellent browser support, but there are still people out there with older browsers. Here's the list of supported browsers from the Google Maps Help site:

* IE 5.5+ (download: Windows)
* Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Safari 1.2.4+ (download: Mac)
* Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Opera 7+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)

Am I to understand that Google Maps won't work in IE 5.0/Win or Opera 6? Or how about IE/Mac... are these users just plain out of luck?

Another point is reliability. Using links means that if Google changes their anything major in their system, my users may not be able to see the maps at all!

Now, on the other hand, Google Maps is awesome! Way more flexible (zoom in/out), it prints nicely, etc. I think that if I were visiting a site, I'd rather see a link to google maps than a boring old .jpeg.

Just wanted to bounce the idea off some other developers... which way would everybody else go?

thanks,
epibeta.

[whoisgregg]

Use Google Maps *and* a <noscript></noscript> jpeg map. :)

[Epibeta]

Actually, I hadn't really thought about using the Google Maps API, I was just going to link to particular spots on maps.google.com. However, now that you mention it, I could easily just have 2 links for each location - one for a jpeg and one for google! (*slaps forhead*)

Thanks!
Epibeta.

[whoisgregg]

The API is dead easy to implement. I highly recommend it. Just be sure to test with Windows IE, as there's a nasty little bug that throws a bad looking error message if you use the sample code directly from the main Google Maps API sample code page.