[OSM-dev] OpenStreetMap Cartographic: A client-side rendered OpenStreetMap Carto

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Tue May 26 01:58:50 UTC 2020


On 2020-05-25 9:25 a.m., Jason Remillard wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> The Mapbox GL styles are very low level, and are like the mapnik XML 
> input files. The Mapbox GL editing tools available don't seem to 
> provide abstractions over the underlying specification.

Yes, the specification and tools are quite clearly not designed for 
human readability. There has been some work at languages that compile to 
Mapbox GL styles, but nothing that supports expressions yet.

> Also, rewriting from scratch the main OpenStreetMap Carto style sheet 
> is not appealing. There has been a lot of work put into it, and 
> whatever happens next, everybody is going to be living with it for a 
> long time.

I'm a maintainer of OpenStreetMap Carto so I'm familiar with its 
development. I don't think this is a problem. It's not from scratch, 
it's implementing existing cartography in a new language.

> I have done some projects with Mapbox GL with client side rendering, 
> and the performance on my tiny style sheet was unacceptable on mobile. 
> Having the main style sheet use client side rendering will need to 
> wait for newer and faster phones.

Performance with normal basemaps and small stylesheets should be 
acceptable. The question is, how do you get normal sized tiles at low 
zooms from OSM data, how big will the tiles be at high zooms, and will 
the stylesheet be too complex.


> Going back to the problems. Long term it is clear that it would be a 
> good thing if OSM had a client side rendering option. Also, right now, 
> the existing tile servers are overloaded. A victim of the projects 
> ongoing success and CartoCSS baked in performance issues.

No, the issues have been with the tile CDN, not the tile servers. 
CartoCSS has never been a performance issue.




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