[OSM-talk] Actually using OpenStreetMap and the usabilityof the current maps

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Tom Chance <tom <at> acrewoods.net> writes:

> 
> 
> Hullo,
...
> 
> We'll never resolve issues to do with road names and which roads you show
> in one layer, simply because of transport modes. As a cyclist I don't much
> care about primary road refs, but I do like zooming out and seeing all the
> roads in context. As a public transport user, I like seeing where the
> railway lines go, in fact it would be fun to find creative ways of
> visualising rail connections. The only solution is to create your own
> tileset and hope it's popular enough to get onto the OSM main page, as per
> the cycling layer.

Tilesets are for sure great for serving maps effectively for big audience.
However, we have already seen that predefined layouts will never make everybody
happy.  Perhaps one day old-fashioned map servers which are rendering maps on
demand will have more place again. A public WMS server delivering OSM data
through  together with a user contributed library of SLD files for styling would
be a nice thing to see. Unfortunately it would most probably be overloaded and
slow :(