[OSM-talk] Things People Say

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Fri Dec 30 14:51:13 GMT 2011


Frederik Ramm writes:
 > For me, the idea of a user friendly map portal (with a nice brand name 
 > and matching apps, with maps, routing, geocoding, aerial imagery, 
 > streetview imagery and all) is not a *bad* idea, and if someone made 
 > such a portal they should certainly be encouraged to use OSM for it. 

When I worked for Cloudmade I found a nice book on map
projections. They bought it for me because they were nice that
way. Without going into any of the projections, lesson #1 from that
book is: every map has its compromises. All of them. So, purely from a
technical standpoint, we shouldn't be telling people that Mapnik is
the be-all and end-all of map tile sets.

IMHO, Mapnik is the tile set for OSM editors. As such, it should be
more concerned about completeness than anything else. And as such, map
editors will be happy to click on a http://mapnik.osm.org link on the
front page of OSM. It's probably MUCH better for our community of
users if we give them a list of links to maps, than if we show them
just one map. Make it a bunch of screen shots of the same place with
links.

-- 
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