[OSM-dev] Projection Issues

[Nick Whitelegg]

>At this point, I'm largely just confused, and I'm willing to
>admit that I think with the current setup, OSM and OpenLayers simply
>aren't going to work together. I don't claim to understand projections
>well enough to know what's going on, and without knowing that, I can't
>begin to create a tile system that will grab tiles in the same format as
>OSM currently is.

Having seen this talk of OpenLayers, I was going to experiment with it 
this evening to see if it will talk to the new renderer (see recent dev 
posts). Will OpenLayers accept the URL of a simple WMS-compliant server 
i.e. a script which accepts bbox, width, height and layers parameters? I 
note that the examples e.g. the Boston Free Map take a ".map" file which 
is (I believe) a configuration file for Mapserver, but presumably 
OpenLayers will talk to any WMS server.

Without an in-depth knowledge of projections, I know that tile.js takes in 
a "real" longitude and latitude and converts the latitude to a Mercator 
latitude (see e.g. http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/javascript/tile.js)
The OSM tile renderer then accepts a bounding box of regular longitudes 
and Mercator latitudes.

Anyhow, unless someone advises me otherwise I will experiment later on and 
post the outcome here.

Nick