Hi, Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote: > Yuk! No! Don't do this! Why produce half-transparent tiles when you > could just carry on producing tiles of the neighbouring countries (or > even the whole world) in your national style.
As I said, that's the easy bit. We already have "the whole world in British colours" and I'm sure we will get "the whole world in German colours" (which actually I hear some cartographers refer to as the "Michelin style" so it may not be German after all) before we see anything fancy like I described. However, I still think it would be fascinating to produce ONE map (where you can zoom and pan across the world and don't have to stop at borders) and still allow national or even, sometimes, regional groups to define what they want on "their" part of the map. The practical use for the tourist ("explain the world to me in terms I am familiar with") will be limited, but it will be a fantastic tool for those culturally interested. For example, a country in which nature reserves play an important role will naturally want to have them displayed at early zoom levels, and in other countries these might appear as a dotted line on z15. Same for all other kinds of things. The Iceland map will show filling stations at zoom level 8 ;-) and so on. If you don't share the vision then stick to your "one size fits all" mapping. I'm not saying we should remove that map, but I am sure that if we manage to create an infrastructure supporting something like that, then the rewards will be great. (It doesn't even have to be done by OSM on OSM servers, anyone can do it.) I am also very keen on the "grassroots" aspect of this. I want people to be able to define their part of the map without having to go via central command (where their request might well be met with "we understand that you would like to have this but it has an undesirable side effect on the other side of the earth"). Of course, even today every country can have their own slippy map and their own tiles and it's happening everywhere already (freemap.sk comes to mind but there are many others). The missing link is (only) a clever OpenLayers extension that would mix'n'match tiles from various national servers. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk