[Tilesathome] Osmarender strength points?

[Mario Ferraro]

Hi to all :)

You know, I love Osmarender/Tiles at Home, having worked with them for 
Osmarender Frontend during SoC08, doing MyTaH Firefox extension and now 
beginning to develop a or/p porting in JavaScript (or/js, not yet 
completed and with many bugs to fix :), but live example can be found 
here[0], Firefox 3.0 required... thanks thousands times to Frederik for 
guidance :)), to verify if, also thanks to TraceMonkey, the new JS 
engine Firefox 3.5 will have, we can achieve faster rendering times in 
the browser beyond the XSLT.

What I was trying to figure out is, beyond my own love :), what are the 
reasons why an user should choose Osmarender, for example, to browse the 
slippy map. Mapnik maps, e.g., are objectively more eye pleasing and 
(even if it needs a whole infrastructure to have it working) way faster 
to render.

So, what I would like to point out and ask the mailing list for opinions 
is: which are the _real_ strength points we have "against" Mapnik? What 
we can do to "advertise" Osmarender better and what can we do to expose 
cool opportunities with it?

What I would like (or would have liked) to do, with Osmafrontend and 
or/js, is to show that one of the strength points is that Osmarender can 
do, for example, live rendering in a browser without any infrastructure, 
and this should be before or then in some way evident in the web site, 
or at least it can be a starting point for this discussion and/or 
further/new development, if someone wants to join :)

Cheers,
Mario Ferraro

[0] http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~Merio/orjs/orjs.xml