[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Carto design

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 29 June 2018, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> [...]
>
> So the ease of participating or customising has more or less already
> gone down the drain; what's still good about OSM Carto is that at
> least you can easily install it as-is on your own infrastructure (I
> regularly do that for business clients), but I fear it is only a
> matter of time until this aspect of usability, too, will be
> abandoned, and you will have to run massive pre-computation jobs in
> order to even get your map off the ground...

I think this is unlikely to happen.  Pre-computation is essential for 
good quality maps at low to mid zoom levels but OSM-Carto was never 
particularly predestined for a leadership role in this field.  In the 
past year or so many decisions have been made that define a fairly 
tight framework pointing away from using pre-computation.  It is 
doubtful that even the move to water polygons for the coastlines, i.e. 
a small change in the way pre-computation is employed, will happen 
since there are design choices incompatible with this.

There are other open map design projects which are more open to 
pre-computation techniques, in particular OpenTopoMap.

Regarding splitting OSM-Carto into two styles - i have my doubts about 
this - both regarding if this makes sense and if it would work.  But i 
think it would be very good to have this discussion on a more abstract 
level, i.e. what kind of map style or styles should the OSMF render on 
its infrastructure.  The OSMF should obviously not try to initiate or 
manage map design projects themselves but existing or new independent 
projects might be interested in what it takes to have a chance to be 
supported by the OSMF in this form.  We have guidelines for layers on 
osm.org hosted elsewhere:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers/Guidelines_for_new_tile_layers

but we don't have any sort of policy or guideline regarding what is 
rendered on OSMF servers.  As long as OSM-Carto is set for this and 
considered 'alternativlos' this is a non-issue but since it is clear 
that this will not necessarily be the case in all eternity and the idea 
is floated to maybe even render more than one style this becomes a 
relevant question.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/