Hi, Greg wrote: > I think I'm on safe ground with my presumption that maps are recorded and > stored in vector format.
True, but they are also automatically processed into bitmaps, which then get delivered to the browser. > 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. It doesn't render the map from vectors at the time of viewing (unless you're talking Potlatch or the "data" layers which do, and they take a negligible amount of time to render compared with the time used to retrieve the data). > 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. Theoretically yes, the original Osmarender is XSLT based and so runs in a browser. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Osmarender_Frontend for a cool render-in-browser application. However this will not make things faster because it will increase the strain on the database to deliver the data to be rendered, a database which is already under some strain. Again, there's some work done to improve that by tiling the existing data into parcels for quick access, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OJW%27s_tile_data_server, but that's not in productive use as far as I know. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
