2009/3/6 Robert (Jamie) Munro <[email protected]> > I hate it when I go on holiday and I can't understand the colours of the > maps. A choice of UK Style, German Style, USA Style rendering for the > whole world would be nice, particularly if it defaulted to whichever > country you were in by IP address geolocation. I'm sure it will be > easier to impliment than a single map with inconsistent syle, and I'm > fairly confident that the resources required are not huge - particulary > as introducing new layer servers reduces the load on the existing single > tile server. >
While I like the idea of having multiple styles available, I have to argue that I don't believe IP address geolocation would be the 'right' way to select a default style... IP address geolocation is something that's heavily overused... If you take your computer with you to Paraguay, do you want the map to default to being centered on your approximate current location? quite probably... but, would you want the entire map/site to show in Spanish/Guarani? Probably not, you'd probably want language to be based on the language headers that your browser advertises it's willing to accept... As far as default style goes, I'd suggest that after failing to find a stored default for that particular user/browser that the user's acceptable languages would provide a better information source for guessing a preferred map style, i.e. if en-gb is the higher priority language, UK style, if en-us, the US style, de, the German style etc... Obviously, it still relies on the machine... If you are using a net bar pc in Paraguay that has a browser configured to suggest it's willing to accept Spanish only then whatever is used in lieu of user details or preference settings isn't necessarily going to be ideal, but, short of making the website telepathic, not much can be done about that... In short, my point is, IP address geolocation can be useful for certain things, but be careful what assumptions are made about a visitor solely based on the location their internet access is provided from and where possible, make it as easy for people to change their preferences to override those assumptions... Regarding the implementation of multiple style layers, first view performance wouldn't necessarily be impacted, but, a larger cache would likely be needed to store the same view with multiple layers without having too much rerendering and for subsequent views of an already rendered area, with 3 layers, there's a significantly increased chance that while other people may have already viewed the same area, they may have used a different layer and as such, the tiles still need rendering... So, the resource requirements would increase somewhat significantly... That said, as you said, additional tile servers would take care of those increased resource requirements... Apologies for the rant about IP address geolocation, as it's currently abused by many sites and companies, it can be very very frustrating :) d
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