[Talk-GB] New Map Style feedback

[Richard Fairhurst]

Amaroussi (OpenStreetMap) wrote:
> I will support adding an alternative layer to the 
> main site that uses the “British” colours

I would suggest that is a pretty daft idea.

There are many people, myself included, who have the technical knowledge and
resources to set up a UK-only render, updated once a week by a reimport from
a Geofabrik extract.

There are many fewer people who have the technical knowledge and resources
to set up a worldwide render, continually updated, with enough bandwidth to
accommodate all of osm.org's visitors, with a sysadmin prepared to assure
five-nines availability, and protected against the eight gazillion scrapers
who will flock to it as they flock to any free-of-charge stylesheet with
worldwide coverage.

If you ask for the moon, you probably won't get anything!

> I will suggest however that the “British” stylesheet be based 
> from the main openstreetmap-carto style, in order to ease 
> maintenance.

I would suggest that is a _really_ daft idea.

I greatly respect those who put their time into openstreetmap-carto,
particularly this latest change, which is why I said so on the talk@ list.
Whether you like the changes or not, it takes real dedication and commitment
to the cause to spend so much time trying to reach consensus, testing and
re-testing, uploading countless screenshots, all for no personal gain. I
couldn't do it and I can only salute those who do.

Nonetheless, osm-carto, before or after the changes, is certainly not my
idea of good-looking cartography and I would be surprised if it's many
people's. It is a compromise style, hindered by some degree of technical
debt (the need to work with the existing osm.org rendering database) and the
need to address the concerns of an international audience. For example,
there are no Lua transformations to get proper UK PRoW rendering, in the way
that Andy Townsend and I have both done in our respective styles. It's like
the old "camel designed by committee": it does very well at its intended
job, i.e. not dying in the desert, but no-one would pretend it's
particularly pretty.

It's a big complex stylesheet and, again IMO, not much fun to work on. It
would be much more productive, and enjoyable, to start from scratch. It
isn't difficult: the last time I designed a new UK-flavoured cartographic
style and set it up for a client with a one-off import, it took me
(...checks back...) 1.5 days. Yes, OSM-UK would ultimately want more and be
more complex than that, but it's not a massive thing.

Back in 2011, Luke Smith from Grough posted a terrific example to this list
of a style he'd been working on, combining OSM and OS OpenData:

    http://www.grough.co.uk/lib/documents/tmp/lss/tq28.jpg
    http://www.grough.co.uk/lib/documents/tmp/lss/nn17.jpg

That is brilliant, and the sort of quality we should be aiming for - not a
reheated version of deep-purple POIs, lowest common denominator fonts that
are required because somewhere in Thailand uses characters which aren't
available in a nice Western font, the blue/green/red map colours that I
chose back in 2008 based on a map I'd done for the Cotswold Canals Trust,
and those bloody awful BR roundel-style shields that I sent Steve Chilton
once and have been regretting for the past n years.

Maybe someone here will be inspired to do something good like that. Maybe I
will, though the constant grousing and moaning isn't exactly inspiring me
with hope that it would be a pleasant endeavour. Or maybe the Mappa Mercia
guys might accelerate their plans for an England & Wales chapter and secure
a little bit of funding to pay for one of us cartographers to spend a few
days on it!

Richard




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