A newb question: I think I'm on safe ground with my presumption that maps are recorded and stored in vector format. I observe that whan I try to _use_ the map (on Firefox 3 on SuSE 10.3/Linux) it takes a looooong time to render and does so in a bitmap format.
Since my browser is able to render SVG natively (albeit a subset of the full SVG spec), is there a way to offload some of the processing burden from the server and retrieve maps in vector format. It strikes me that there should be some considerable advantages to doing this (if it's not already available :o) ) Not least would be resolution independence. quicker zooming and, of particular interest to me, the ability to show/hide/make-translucent chosen features by category/name/layer/type/&c. Clearly there are some technical issues, such as how much of the detail to download at each zoomed level (Don't need to specify the pavement widths or even the existence of their host roads on a view of a continent) but I presume AJAXy technology can incrementally add/remove detail into/from the SVG DOM, on the zoom request <excuse>I guess I'm being a bit lazy and putting in a feature request without the prior research</excuse> but <hope>I'm sure you'll be kind and let me know in a kind and considerate way </hope> Cheers Greg (UK) _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
