[OSM-dev] Hello World

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2012/10/13 Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch>:
> My personal view on this is that anybody expecting that simply replacing
> the current default displayed style with a different one will change
> anything is kidding himself in a big way. The pressure to include
> everything and the kitchen sink will not go away and instead just
> refocus. It might be good idea to change the misleading labelling of the
> default style to make it clear that we don't think the standard for an
> OSM data derived map should be totally overloaded, but again that is
> just me.


While the inclusion of some stuff (or the integration in lower zoom
levels, e.g. leisure=* on nodes in Z15, pubs in Z16)  provokes in some
areas the feeling that the map is overloaded, there are still missing
some traditionally important features (e.g. city gates (or their
names) are usually still a main reference in older cities). What would
be really nice is a zoom level dependent display based on the density.
In a rural area the one church/pub/hotel/camping... might merit to be
displayed also on zoom 14 or 15, while in a dense urban area it
shouldn't show up before z17/18 for example. The same is also valid
for roads to a certain degree (if there aren't any motorways in a
country you would want to see the primaries earlier, e.g. in a desert
region with sparse population).

I know this kind of stuff is quite complicated to do, at least in real
time it might be (almost) impossible. But given the amount of
brilliant people contributing to OSM, maybe there is a way?

cheers,
Martin