[OSM-dev] Please readd "OSM" as export format

[Jason Remillard]

Hi John,

Just one thought. The scale issue is not going to be part of our users
mental model because its source is a limitation of our servers not
having enough capacity/bandwidth to handle large extracts. It is not
an intrinsic aspect of the users task, it is an ugly implementation
detail that we can't cover up. Nobody is going to understand this
ahead of time and is virtually guaranteed to be a surprise for new
people.

You could put OSM into the download format list ...
  - have the same fancy dynamic warning appears in the export page
  - wait until they press the download button, then say sorry it is
too large :-(
  - look at the bb and just dump them to the correct extract on geofabrik.
  - Just always do extracts from one of the mirror servers that have
the capacity to do really large extracts, to reduce the probability
that users need to under stand this edge case.

You are doing a great job with the changes and this is very minor
issue. I am sure very few people are actually downloading osm files.
But, I am hoping long term, we can kill off the left hand panel. This
would be one small step in that direction.

Thanks
Jason.

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 5:05 PM, John Firebaugh <john.firebaugh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Jason Remillard <remillard.jason at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> For what its worth, it does kind of make sense to have a download osm
>> "export" option in the new share window to consolidate things. Png,
>> SVG, OSM.
>
>
> Separating "Share" and "Export" was an intentional design change; I don't
> think consolidating them works very well, for a couple reasons. One,
> different audiences -- sharing via a link, embed, or image are simple,
> consumer-mapping oriented tasks of the sort where OSM has some overlap with
> other map providers, while export is for the more technically inclined (and
> what differentiates OSM). Two, sharing is scale agnostic, while the export
> provided by osm.org works only for small areas. By separating them, I gained
> space for the export pane to provide information about bulk downloads:
> https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/98601/940876/1cfb5cfa-0137-11e3-823d-914c1a079692.png