[OSM-talk] Is there a OSM map viewer program to dynamically view OSM data?

[Wuzzy]

> If you
> were zoomed out enough to see a whole country, it would have to
> download *all* of the data for the country (hundreds of megabytes).
> Make your "direct" app see all of spain and wait for a 533 MB download
> (which would take the server significant resources and time to
> generate and compress) before anything appears...

Whoops. Yeah, it's right, that's not a smart move indeed

> What you can do is create vector tiles from the openstreetmap data,
> with reduced detail at reduced zooms, etc. for example only having
> borders and no streets or points of interest when you're looking at
> entire countries, and then render *that* with whatever style. But no
> matter what, you have to put *some* styling decisions on the
> generation of the vector tiles, mainly what data may be visible at
> what zooms, eg. to stop residential streets from being on the z2
> tiles.

That sounds like an interesting idea, yeah. If the

Of course you have to do *some* styling, that's part of the job of the
application, I guess? The idea is to let the application plug in
different predefined styles or even let the user do it (i.e. set symbols
for POIs, or define that a street (way) of type XYZ is shown as a line
with color A, width B, etc. etc.
Kinda a “make your own map style” tool as well. xD

I just noticed the application I want to see suddenly sounds really
sophisticated. xD

It does not seem such an application exists right now. At least nobody
could point me to one so far. :-(