[Openstreetmap] Site Update

[Lars Aronsson]

Mikel Maron wrote:

> A few new features have just launched on www.openstreetmap.org ..
> javascript slippy map, intl city geocoder, and a fresh UI. 

This is great!  Where do the city names and coordinates come from? 
How about displaying the city names on the map?  Umlauts seem to 
be missing from the names.  It can find Orebro and Linkoping, but 
not Örebro or Linköping.  It finds an impressive number of small 
places, such as Kaga, Sweden.  I think less than 200 people live 
there.  For ambigious names (e.g. Viby, Sweden) it picks one of 
the places without asking.

Would it be possible to make the city search result in a redirect 
to the correct URL?  As it is now, my browser's Location field and 
browse history (back button) are not updated when I jump between 
cities.  If a parameter like &title=Luxor,_Egypt was added to the 
redirect URL, this value could be displayed in the HTML <title> as 
well, so the browser's history would become useful.

There also needs to be a "link to this map" link (like Google Maps 
has), so the current coordinates become part of the URL in the 
browser's Location field.

I see the map viewer and edit applet now use a "zoom" parameter 
with integral values, rather than the random precision "scale".  
Now I get the same (cached) map for &scale=0.003 and 
&scale=0.0031.  This should radically increase the map server's 
cache-hit-ratio.

I also see the edit applet is restricted to zoom levels 14 (or 13) 
and higher, and I would like to be able to zoom out more.  It can 
be very hard to find yellow (yet undrawn) areas now.  Is it really 
useful to zoom in to level 30 and beyond?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se