[Mapcss] Kothic JS - a full-featured JavaScript map rendering engine using HTML5 Canvas

[Peter Wendorff]

Hi Steve.
I'm happy about that great client-side rendering, because there are 
projects, where it could be extremely useful.
We have a web portal in planning stage with blind and visually impaired 
people as the main target group.
Of course it's not useful to give a blind man a visual rendered map - 
there we have to find other solutions, but for visually impaired people, 
who are able to see images with very big countours or with higher or 
lower contrast, or who have to avoid collisions between red and green or 
something like that it is possible to render maps in a way, that they 
are accessible.
The problem is: there is not one accessible map - there are many 
variants, each useful for one or perhaps a couple of users.

Prerendering and storing a dozen maps would be waste of server and 
storage capacity.
But rendering at client side, possibly giving the user a tool to 
customize his rendering via mapcss would be great. There even two or 
three seconds would not matter much in some cases.

regards
Peter

Am 20.06.2011 08:55, schrieb Steve Bennett:
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:02 AM, Komяpa<me at komzpa.net>  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Glad to announce the first release of Kothic JS map rendering engine.
> Incidentally, what are the goals for this cool technology? One thought
> occurs that it could be integrated with other rendering platforms to
> do on-demand rendering where the "real" tiles aren't yet rendered. But
> for that to be useful, you'd probably need a server side renderer that
> produced passably similar tiles...
>
> I guess another huge benefit is allowing user customisation. Maybe
> some site would serve up pre-rendered base tiles, with customised
> Kothic JC tiles over the top.
>
> The question also arises: how does Kothic JS relate to Halcyon? Both
> are ECMAscript-based, MapCSS-compliant OSM renderers. I suppose Kothic
> renders to tiles whereas Halcyon renders to native Flex sprites.
>
> (Apologies for thinking out loud here...)
>
> Steve
>
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