Fact 1. The Cantor set $K$ is "universal" among nonempty compact metric spaces in the following sense: given any nonempty compact metric space $X$, there exists a continuous surjection $f\colon K \to X$.

Fact 2. The closed interval $I$ has a similar "universal" property among nonempty compact connected and locally connected metric spaces: given any such space $X$, there exists a continuous surjection $f \colon I \to X$.

This makes me wonder: is there a compact connected metric space $J$ such that for any nonempty compact connected metric space $X$, there exists a continuous surjection $f \colon J \to X$?

Such a space $J$, if it exists, would be 'intermediate' between $I$ and $K$: there would need to be continuous surjections

$$ K \to J \to I $$

Fact 1 is sometimes called the Alexandroff–Hausdorff theorem, since appeared in the second edition of Felix Hausdorff’s Mengenlehre in 1927 and also in an article by Pavel Alexandroff published in Mathematischen Annalen in the same year. Fact 2 was proved by Hans Hahn in 1914 and reproved by him more nicely in 1928. For a nice history of these results, see:

• L. Koudela, The Hausdorff–Alexandroff theorem and its application in theory of curves, WDS'07 Proceedings of Contributed Papers, Part I, 2007, pp. 257–260.

One may rightly complain that "universal" is the wrong word above, since we're not claiming there exists a unique continuous surjection, and indeed there's usually not. A better term is versal. There can be two non-homeomorphic spaces having the same versal property. For example, $I^2$ would work just as well as $I$ in Fact 2, thanks to the existence of space-filling curves.

Nonetheless we can create a category in which these versal properties become universal, by a cheap trick. Let $\mathrm{CompMet}$ be the collection of all homeomorphism classes of nonempty compact metric spaces, and put a partial order on this where $[X] \ge [Y]$ iff there exists a continuous surjection $f \colon X \to Y$. The homeomorphism class of the Cantor set is the top element of the poset $\mathrm{CompMet}$. My question asks if the subset $\mathrm{CompMet}$ coming from connected compact metric spaces has a top element.

I'd appreciate any interesting information on this poset $\mathrm{CompMet}$.

For example, I think that there's a map sending each element of $\mathrm{CompNet}$ to its number of connected components, and I think that this is an order-preserving map from $\mathrm{CompMet}$ to the cardinals less than or equal to the continuum. But there also seems to be an order-preserving map sending each element of $\mathrm{CompNet}$ to its number of path-connected components. Are there other interesting maps like this?