Hi, Tom Hughes wrote: > I'm not sure delegating to all sort of different servers is the best way > to implement such a thing for lots of reasons. We just need the master > stylesheet to be able to take location into account when rendering.
That's how Google does it of course and it is, issues of scale aside, the easy choice. (And yes their motorway style changes, slightly, at many borders e.g. between Germany and France or Austria; maybe that's to denote toll motorways though and not a specifc national style.) > Aside from anything else if you did it by delegation the style could > only change on the edge of a tile. No; if done cleverly, national servers could produce half transparent tiles at the borders. I know it would be quite a feat to set up something like this, and every time you view a map of Europe then half the tiles would be missing because the Czech or Austrian or Hungarian or German server had a hiccup at that moment and so on. But it would be a really cool thing to have and help us get away from ugly centralism. We work and map and meet regionally; why not champion an architecture that actually takes this into account. Could make a nice Google SoC project and/or even attract EU funding under some kind of "unity in diversity" programme. I'm not suggesting to take away your holy central tile rendering; I'm sure that will always be needed to be practical. But an extra project on extra hardware with distributed tiles and nationally or even regionally decided styles... would be nice. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
