[OSM-dev] Status of the Mapnik stylesheets

[Richard Fairhurst]

Matt Amos wrote:
> i'd sound a note of caution about having separate "clean" and 
> "detailed" styles. we sort-of did that before with mapnik and 
> osmarender respectively and... well, we don't have 
> osmarender any more.

That was a technology failure, though, rather than anything wrong with the
concept itself.

In principle, there are clear, identifiable, distinct needs for a "showcase
style" and a "debugging view". We want the great unwashed to look at OSM and
say "wow, that's a complete, accurate map"; and we want our mappers to enjoy
the gratification of seeing their changes rendered, because that's a
powerful incentive to keep contributing.

(I use the word "view" rather than "style" because it's conceivable that the
latter could be provided some other way than a traditional Mapnik
stylesheet, perhaps something along the lines of Kothic-JS.)

So the problems we have right now are:

- we don't have a debugging view, and that leads to inappropriate pressure
on the showcase style (e.g. the 8,000 tints for subtly different forms of
landuse)

- the showcase style is temporarily stalled due to technological issues

and both need fixing sooner rather than later.

(For the showcase style, personally I think XML vs CSS is more of a problem
than svn vs git, but that's an implementation detail.)

cheers
Richard





--
View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Status-of-the-Mapnik-stylesheets-tp5735606p5735775.html
Sent from the Developer Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com.