[OSM-dev] Status of the Mapnik stylesheets

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Fri Nov 16 12:24:21 GMT 2012


On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>wrote:

> 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.
>

the greater resources required to render osmarender worldwide may have
played a part, but that part of the problem was the one getting the most
attention with tiles at home and so forth. my take on it was that many,
perhaps most, people felt the extremely "detailed" style that
osmarender/tiles at home was producing wasn't as pleasant as the mapnik style,
so it got second billing, less re-use, and that's what led to its decline.

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.)
>

i agree, but would go further and suggest that the debugging view might be
better constructed on top of the "showcase style", rather than being able
to (d)evolve independently of it. i would further suggest that the
gratification of seeing changes rendered is strongly reliant on those
changes being visible directly on osm.org, which (i think) leads to the
conclusion that these two "views" cannot be separate, and must be
integrated somehow.


> (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.)
>

i'd like to applaud Andy Allan's recent work in this area [1]. this is
excellent stuff, and many thanks to Andy for starting it :-)

cheers,

matt

[1] https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
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