[OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

[D Tucny]

2009/3/6 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>

> 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").
>

If multiple whole world style layers exist then what you suggest would be
reasonably simple to acheive, as long as the base styles were reasonably
similar and you didn't mind too much if the boundaries were a bit 'messy'...
To get a prettier single view of multiple styles with styles changing along
borders however would be somewhat trickier to acheive and I guess you'd at
least need lower zooms to be rendered with multiple styles able to coexist
in a single tile for certain areas at least, i.e. if you wanted a separate
UK and Euro style... To split the americas from the rest of the world would
be somewhat easier thanks to the large expanses of sea :)

d
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