Hi,
I am often confronted with people from the classic GIS world who
tend to think that tiles are somehow second-class and anything "serious"
needs to be in WMS (or, at least, OGC TMS).
Upon closer inspection, if their software supports it, most users are
actually *better off* with a standard OSM-style tile server than with
WMS. (If their software doesn't support it then you end up using some
sort of tile-to-WMS rescaling which messes up the good looks.)
Until now, there were two use cases where I advised users to go for WMS
rather than tiles: 1. if they needed lots of different projections and
variable scaling; 2. if they needed lots of different layers (e.g.
roads, buildings, landuse areas, waterways, POIs, ...).
I'm beginning to think that #2 need not be a reason to use WMS. Given
the way our rendering works, it should only be minimally more expensive
to create, say, 10 meta-tiles for an area, each with different features
drawn on it, than just one. It would break some layering - if you paint
roads and railways on different tiles then you can *either* display
roads over railways or railways over roads but not - but on the whole it
should not be too bad.
Has anyone done some experimentation in that direction? I know that
Nop's riding+walking map uses three layers (OSM background, third-party
hillshading, OSM foreground), and of course I've seen the grand
ImageMagick-based TopOSM. Has anyone tried a multi-overlay tile server
in Mapnik?
Bye
Frederik
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