Hi, I became aware of the new scale bar on the slippy map through another thread over on dev. It's certainly nice to have one, and it was an obvious absence that google maps (and others) had but OSM didn't.
However, we have copied an aspect of Google Maps that always annoyed me. Paper maps frequently show both Metric and Imperial units, for the valid reason that the publisher can't predict which of the two the reader will prefer. That's a restriction that needn't apply to online maps, though, and it has always seemed to me to be needless clutter. >From what I can tell based on a quick look at the Openlayers documentation, not only does it support single unit scale bars, that's actually the default. For the slippy map, there seem to be a few low-impact ways that we could improve the presentation: * Make unit preference a profile element for logged-in users (in fact, "dual" could be considered an option). * For non-logged-in users, we could either continue to show a dual scale _or_ there could be a unit-switching option on screen. We could even toss users a cookie to help recall that preference if that doesn't seem too evil. Opinions? Dermot _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
