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clemsos / wiki-plugin-map

Federated Wiki - Map Plugin
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Gallery of Map Tile Providers #10

Open WardCunningham opened 8 years ago

WardCunningham commented 8 years ago

I suggest that our about pages include a gallery of maps rendered with available tiles. How many open tile providers are there? Five? Ten? Hopefully not hundreds, but if we should be so fortunate we could pick the most popular or most diverse ten.

I would like to move the copyright notices to the about pages too. If we acknowledge all of the copyrights of all of the providers we support in the always available documentation then I think we have met our obligations without sacrificing pixels on our already small maps.

The gallery would include an index, About Available Map Tiles, that would link to a preview page for each tile provider. The preview page could show maps at different scales, local, regional and national, perhaps. One would select a style by dragging the desired sample to their own page.

WardCunningham commented 8 years ago

I was surprised and delighted to see the about page sample rendered in Stamen Design tiles. It took me a while to figure out how this had happened. (Answer: It had been wired into the item json and came down to my computer when I pulled @clemsos changes.) I reverted this change but was immediately hooked on the opportunity it suggested.

image

Aside: this marker is at the almost round coordinates, [51.5, 0.0], one of my test data points.

WardCunningham commented 8 years ago

Ok, I clearly did not understand how many sources for tiles there are and how much variety there is for purpose or just style. I spent hours browsing through this gallery: https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

Users can still benefit from some advice on choosing tiles. And we will all benefit from the consequent uniformity. But how to choose? @clemsos, @opn, @paul90, do you have favorites? Comment here.

I can also see where a reader might want to change tiles, from street to topo for example, while browsing content. These changes should revert to the author's choice. The author will have an informed opinion because are maps are for a purpose, not a general map viewer like google maps.

opn commented 8 years ago

Should this not be a DSL command? So:

TILELAYER OpenStreetMap.Mapnik

WardCunningham commented 8 years ago

I'd rather not expose the intricacies of Leaflet and tile providers in the markup. Remember markup has to last longer than any company. Perhaps we could instead offer keywords, STREET, EARTH and TOPO, and leave it to each server operator to bind these to good choices. The map plugin should expose these three choices to the reader as temporary replacements for the author's choice.

Of course a Transporter can be much more specific by binding the right fields.

clemsos commented 8 years ago

STREET, EARTH, TOPO sounds like a good markup to expose then if tiles are specified within the JSON file it will be overrided. Is that correct ?

WardCunningham commented 8 years ago

Yes, that is what I am suggesting. Priority would be: