[OSM-talk] Mapnik rendering of paths + place=locality in general

[Ulf Lamping]

Martijn van Oosterhout schrieb:
> On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 8:47 PM, sylvain letuffe <liste at letuffe.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, I know there are strong oppositions on this list to that way of doing,
>> some guys that "have the power" by the fact they own the renderer might be
>> unappy of changes they have to do on their styles and software and I
>> completly understand them
> 
> Yeah, we have soo much power. We actively prevent people from learning
> how to change things. Not.
> 
> Come on. There is no "the renderer", you can set up your own if you
> like. Anyone can. 

Of course, I could climb on the top of the mount everest - in theory.

In practise I would need a lot of time to learn how to do that.

So in theory you're correct, in practise unfortunately not so much. 
Remember: we're not on OSM-dev here ;-)

BTW: By saying "anyone can" someone can easily understand this as "... 
and if you can't, you're a lazy idiot".

> You just need to realise that putting something on a
> wiki page doesn't obligate anybody to support it. 

I perfectly agree with you here.

> And forget just the
> renderers, there are dozens of programs that have lists of supported
> tags. Next you'll be complaining that certain tags are not supported
> by routing programs... Supporting a new tag has a significant cost and
> I don't think anyone is in a position to force someone to support it
> anywhere.

Yes, I have spend a lot of time bringing POIs to the map rendering in 
JOSM. I can assure you that this can be a very time consuming task.

However.

When I started to work on the map display, I was asking on the list how 
to improve the POI display in general - My idea was that putting the 
POIs on the map will encourage mappers to actually add this stuff to the 
database. You know, stuff that you see is actually a lot more 
interesting than stuff that you don't see :-)

The answers I got from the list for both mapnik/osmarender can be 
summarized as: We don't want to have those icons on our map, this will 
look ugly.

This really discouraged me to spend any effort on improving the mapnik 
or osmarender maps.

In the meantime, the map display in JOSM has currently - by far - the 
best coverage in POI display compared to Mapnik / Osmarender, mostly 
because of effort I spend on this topic.


So yes, the list (if this is what you meant with "we"?) actually 
prevented me to work on the mapnik/osmarender maps ...

Regards, ULFL

P.S: To avoid any missunderstandings: I'm perfectly aware that the 
Mapnik/Osmarender/JOSM map displays all have their advantages and 
disadvantages.