[OSM-dev] Hello World

[Michal Migurski]

On Oct 18, 2012, at 1:41 PM, Alex Barth wrote:

> 
> On Oct 12, 2012, at 1:14 PM, Michal Migurski <mike at teczno.com> wrote:
> 
>> * Create a new map style intended to be the default face of OSM, but leave the current OSM.orgMapnik style as-is. It works beautifully as an editor's basemap due to the dense inclusion of all data. Keep it, but add a new one that's for non-editors to look at.
> 
> I wonder how good the current Mapnik style is for editors.
> 
> Mapping in Latin America I'm for instance noticing more and more how people tag major connecting roads `highway=track` because they're unpaved instead of using an appropriate tag such as `highway=tertiary` and specifying `surface=unpaved`. Tagging for the renderer of course: the problem is that the Mapnik style completely ignores `surface=unpaved` making a significant dirt road really not look how it should on the map. I guess it's clear that there's an issue w/ the style not being maintained right now and it's unclear how to contribute to it, but based on stuff like the unpaved road example I'm starting to think that the Mapnik style does not only need a refresh esthetics wise but it being unmaintained complicates good mapping.


The "unpaved" thing feels like something that would be added to the current style, rather than an excuse to tear it down and start fresh. I'm not a big believer that moving to Github and CartoCSS *alone* (just to cite two ideas from this thread) will be sufficient to make the Mapnik style easier for people to approach. That's probably an easy strawman to knock over. =) My feeling is that setting up a different style, built from the ground-up to be a better presentation of OSM to the general public rather than mappers gets us closer to the goal more easily, and does so without hitting the whole "replace the map style" issue too hard.

-mike.

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michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
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