On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Daniel Koć <daniel@koć.pl> wrote: > We have very uncomfortable situation with rendering styles on our main > website: out of 5 styles available only 2 are general, and only one - > default one - is to some reasonable extent an OSM community effort > (technically it's open, in practice not much people are active there, it is > rather detached from other parts of OSM and is rather conservative > socially).
I see it as a relatively unhappy situation as well. The osm-carto maintainers spent a lot of time fending off requests and demands from outsiders: it looks like a castle with barbarians at the gate. I think a new style, as open as the tagging scheme and database, is a way out both for osm-carto's maintainers and for meeting the wider community needs. -- Separately there's tension over the "clutter of the map". This really should be broken down: * Line styles and fills * points of interest * urban vs. rural areas. New line styles and fills present a visual burden to understanding the map. Too many dashes dots and subtle color variations and everything looks like mush. New POI's, particularly obscure ones, impact few people because they are usually not visible. These often come with text labels that help clarify the meaning of any symbol. There really should be little barrier to rendering more POI types. Many issues are density dependent. In a rural area showing everything is generally just fine and desired. For urban areas overload sets in by the time the fire hydrants, manhole covers, electric lines, bike racks, baby hatches and crosswalks are all rendered. There's a lot of interesting work to be done in the area of density specific rendering: rendering that's sensitive to the scale density and land use type. --------------- The map is also largely delivered in electronic form. There's a lot of potential for delivering dynamic legends and "click for more information", resolving many issues of potential viewer confusion. The flat static map need not communicate everything.
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