[OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:
> Yuk! No! Don't do this! Why produce half-transparent tiles when you
> could just carry on producing tiles of the neighbouring countries (or
> even the whole world) in your national style.

As I said, that's the easy bit. We already have "the whole world in 
British colours" and I'm sure we will get "the whole world in German 
colours" (which actually I hear some cartographers refer to as the 
"Michelin style" so it may not be German after all) before we see 
anything fancy like I described.

However, I still think it would be fascinating to produce ONE map (where 
you can zoom and pan across the world and don't have to stop at borders) 
and still allow national or even, sometimes, regional groups to define 
what they want on "their" part of the map. The practical use for the 
tourist ("explain the world to me in terms I am familiar with") will be 
limited, but it will be a fantastic tool for those culturally 
interested. For example, a country in which nature reserves play an 
important role will naturally want to have them displayed at early zoom 
levels, and in other countries these might appear as a dotted line on 
z15. Same for all other kinds of things. The Iceland map will show 
filling stations at zoom level 8 ;-) and so on.

If you don't share the vision then stick to your "one size fits all" 
mapping. I'm not saying we should remove that map, but I am sure that if 
we manage to create an infrastructure supporting something like that, 
then the rewards will be great. (It doesn't even have to be done by OSM 
on OSM servers, anyone can do it.)

I am also very keen on the "grassroots" aspect of this. I want people to 
be able to define their part of the map without having to go via central 
command (where their request might well be met with "we understand that 
you would like to have this but it has an undesirable side effect on the 
other side of the earth").

Of course, even today every country can have their own slippy map and 
their own tiles and it's happening everywhere already (freemap.sk comes 
to mind but there are many others). The missing link is (only) a clever 
OpenLayers extension that would mix'n'match tiles from various national 
servers.

Bye
Frederik