[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[David Earl]

On 13/12/2007 11:23, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> William Waites wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps there should be no such thing as "names on the map", rather
>> names should be rendered depending according to the language requested
>> by the user. If a user's client is set to Serbian, they should get
>> KOSOVO (or KOCOBO (ersatz cyrillic) depending on character set) if in
>> Albanian then they see KOSOVA.
> 
> It's a great idea, but will require a heck of a lot of work to  
> implement (defining boundaries, multiple tilesets requiring much more  
> rendering, etc.), and therefore I suspect isn't feasible for the near  
> future. It might be best suited to a distributed effort like  
> tiles at home - i.e. if you want the names in your preferred language,  
> fine, go off and render them yourselves.

It is hard in the current way we render. But if openlayers supported 
HTML tiles (i.e. a tile whose content is defined by HTML rather than an 
image format) we could do all sorts of changes on the fly for horizontal 
text and icons(*) - as well as switching languages, we could have layers 
for different kinds of POI and whether their names appear under user 
control.

I don't think boundaries matter for this application - if you are French 
I think you probably want to see 'Londres' for London even though it is 
outside France.

David

(* rendering would generate an image tile and an overlay "tile" for an 
area, the overlay being HTML containing all the positioned text and 
icons, whose visibility can then be controlled individually in 
Javascript using css)