On 2020-05-25 9:25 a.m., Jason Remillard wrote:
Hi Paul,
The Mapbox GL styles are very low level, and are like the mapnik XML
input files. The Mapbox GL editing tools available don't seem to
provide abstractions over the underlying specification.
Yes, the specification and tools are quite clearly not designed for
human readability. There has been some work at languages that compile to
Mapbox GL styles, but nothing that supports expressions yet.
Also, rewriting from scratch the main OpenStreetMap Carto style sheet
is not appealing. There has been a lot of work put into it, and
whatever happens next, everybody is going to be living with it for a
long time.
I'm a maintainer of OpenStreetMap Carto so I'm familiar with its
development. I don't think this is a problem. It's not from scratch,
it's implementing existing cartography in a new language.
I have done some projects with Mapbox GL with client side rendering,
and the performance on my tiny style sheet was unacceptable on mobile.
Having the main style sheet use client side rendering will need to
wait for newer and faster phones.
Performance with normal basemaps and small stylesheets should be
acceptable. The question is, how do you get normal sized tiles at low
zooms from OSM data, how big will the tiles be at high zooms, and will
the stylesheet be too complex.
Going back to the problems. Long term it is clear that it would be a
good thing if OSM had a client side rendering option. Also, right now,
the existing tile servers are overloaded. A victim of the projects
ongoing success and CartoCSS baked in performance issues.
No, the issues have been with the tile CDN, not the tile servers.
CartoCSS has never been a performance issue.
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