[OSM-talk] Freemap in Mercator

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Tue Jul 4 17:07:15 BST 2006


On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 04:48:55PM +0100, Tom Carden wrote:
> On 04/07/06, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at crschmidt.net> wrote:
> >
> >If you want to help out, you can take a look at the CSS -- the 'width:
> >60%' is being interpreted by IE as being "60% of the width of the
> >remaining space", rather than of the whole window, like it should be.
> 
> Does setting a doctype fix it?

Setting a doctype does indeed fix it, at the cost of making Firefox not
listen to 'height:100%' in a way that javascript understands, but I've
set the height to 500px for the time being. (It seems that OSM uses a
fixed size in pixels for their map, so I guess this isn't too horrible.)

> Congrats on getting this up and running in OpenLayers/MapServer by the
> way... your persistence is respectable :)

Well, I spent a total of about 20 hours trying to work out how the
OpenStreetMap "WMS" works, and I spent an hour setting up the data in
Mapserver. I think the only thing that really requires persistence is
working with the current server-side code: Using the API is actually
really easy (so long as you're querying specific items: querying for a
map?bbox call was too slow to be useful at the time), but writing code
that is suitable for committing to OpenStreetMap SVN is not easy.

Redoing what OSM has done for rendering in Mapserver is way easier -- 
but it depends on working against a static data dump, which is not 
appropriate for the homepage given the current frequency of these 
dumps. (Steve seems to think this may be changing in the near future.)

I'd like to see the current freemap.in rendering improve, and
eventually, replace what OSM has for rendering on the server side. I'm
not sure if that goal is something that people are interested in. I'd be
glad to migrate the work I've done to that, but it all depends on
relatively frequent planet-style dumps, which are not yet available.

I also don't want to displace the effort that others have done -- I
think NickW's work is awesome, and I hate to see work thrown away.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer




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