[OSM-talk] "Crudely-drawn pint glasses"

Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu
Wed Jan 30 11:07:34 GMT 2008


In message <47A0575E.5020302 at frankieandshadow.com>
        David Earl <david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:

> How about a bit of positive thinking here!

I'm all for positive thinking. I'm also for realistic thinking, and
as the person that will be expected to make this work that tends to
come to the top of my list. We don't have an infinite stash of
supercomputers and petabytes of disk.

> Doing this doesn't mean necessarily generating every combination of
> tiles possible. Overlays with switches to turn on and off categories
> and particular POIs would make it possible, and there are several ways
> of doing that. (I outlined one some time ago, which would involve
> implementing HTML tiles to openlayers and using style sheet changes to
> turn on and off features in the overlay).

I'm not really sure I understand this - what form would an "HTML tile"
take exactly? I think I understand the basic form of what you're
suggesting I just don't know how you plan to overlay lots of little
squares of HTML over the map?

It's a plausible approach, though it obviously requires some
significant work in OpenLayers from somebody, and I can see some
issues with regard to collision avoidance.

It means having an overlay on the map, which will slow it down quite
a bit, but at least it would only be on overlay.

> Anther solution would be on-demand mapping: the renderers, in whatever
> falvour, are online somewhere and you go through a dialogue to decide
> on an area, choose your features and then get a custom map back a
> short while later - either on screen or as a PDF or whatever.

This is horribly resource intensive though. The ability to export
data in various formats is certainly something we've been talking
about, but it isn't going to scale to huge amounts of use without
a lot of resources, so it's only really suitable for one off use
by individuals.

I have to admit to being a bit confused by the original request
here - it starts off by talking about a leaflet, which implies
that they are looking to create a one-off map to go in a printed
leaflet, but that starts talking about customising the slippy
map, which is not the obvious place to start if you want a custom
map of an area for printing?

> (*) remember we are a highly technologically oriented bunch. My
> experience is that most people know what "Internet Explorer" is but
> don't know it is a browser or that other browsers exist - that's just
> an example of course. (two more from our home page that confuse people
> - 
> lack of a search button to press when you've finished entering your
> search term, and the word "permalink").

Remember that the primary focus of this project, as I understand
it at any rate, is to produce data for other people to use. Making
our own maps from our data is more of a convenience for us and a
way to promote the project than our primary product.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/




More information about the talk mailing list