[OSM-talk] Mapnik style in slippy map

[Tom Chance]

Hullo,

Stephen Socks Gower wrote:
>   It's a little strange, given RichardF's SOTM talk, to be supporting
>   his general plea to keep icons to a minimum with an appeal to
>   mashups!  I'd hope in the future to be able to do much cleverer
>   things with live rendering of OSM-combined-with-other-data, but for
>   now we live in a world of mashups!
>   
>   As suggested on the list a few weeks ago, the next version of
>   OpenGuides will be able to use OSM Mapnik tiles as a layer in the
>   Google map of a node.  This is already in place for the Oxford
>   Guide - look, for example, at
>   http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Prince_Of_Wales,_Iffley
>   
>   At the default zoom, everything seems good, but you might want to
>   zoom in for a bit more detail - so click the + twice and then we
>   see the problem: a Google pin in the middle of two pints of beer -
>   what's that supposed to mean?!
>   
>   OK, in an ideal world, we'd take on board Richard F's SOTM talk and
>   things like http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Cowley_Road
>   wouldn't be a pin, but would have the whole street highlighted. 
>   We're not there yet, and so, for now, we need a simple (but good
>   looking) backdrop for mashups of all sorts.  Please bear this in
>   mind when adding icons for things!
The map that shows up by default when you visit www.openstreetmap.org 
needs to show a decent amount of detail without looking cluttered, and I 
think it currently does a pretty good job of it, though it could show 
more. For example, when I look at an area I've been mapping then OSM 
just looks so much nicer and is more informative than Google Maps, 
Multimap, A-Z, and so on:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.46448274191246&lon=-0.07183395124802842&zoom=16&layers=B0F

The trouble is that you can't predict what people want for their 
mashups. I would have thought a detailed map showing lots of amenities 
at appropriate zoom levels would be really handy for a tourist guide web 
site, for example, but you state the opposite with your examples.

Perhaps what we need is two sets of tiles, one designed for mashups with 
very minimal information, and one designed for www.openstreetmap.org 
with a decent balance at all levels. I'm sure some might say we already 
have this with Mapnik / Osmarender, but then the latter isn't the 
default view (and how many people will bother to switch layers?) and I 
also personally think that Mapnik looks much neater and more professional.

Kind regards,
Tom