Modest Maps UI?

[tmcw]

So, thinking more about this: how about moving some of the more UI-esque stuff from Wax into a project called MMUI or MMI and maintaining them as a group? This could make communicating what MM is and what Wax is easier, and make things clearer for users.

This would probably mean:

• Zoomer
• point selection
• bounding box selection (mind-meld the Wax impl with the cool one in examples)
• zoom box

This wouldn't envelop the more MapBox-specific things like interactivity or TileJSON.

This is kind of broad, so thoughts - @RandomEtc @migurski @shawnbot ? I can do a lot of the splitting and dicing here.

[shawnbot]

I like the idea of formalizing the common map controls, but I think that it would make more sense to make them part of modestmaps-js rather than a separate project. I haven't seen a Leaflet or Polymaps map that doesn't use the built-in controls (and very few OpenLayers or Google Maps), so it's reasonable to assume that lots of people would use whatever came with MMJS. It would also be nice to suggest some best practices by making the included controls work well (for instance, canceling double-click events on the zoom buttons so that the map doesn't zoom in on that point).

One note on styling: both Polymaps and Leaflet basically require you to link or copy a big chunk of CSS in order for the controls to look any good. So I think that, in the spirit of modesty, our controls should work well out of the box with a minimum of external CSS (preferably none at all).

[RandomEtc]

Strongly disagree on bundling default controls with Modest Maps. If you want that, use Leaflet :-p

The proposed modestmaps-ui could/should bundle Modest Maps, since it will depend on it, but not the other way around. Otherwise it will get to a point where you want to start having "slim" profiles of Modest Maps for projects that don't want default UI, and that way OpenLayers madness lies.

[tmcw]

Strongly disagree on bundling default controls with Modest Maps. If you want that, use Leaflet :-p

Strongly agree - I don't want this to be bundled, and don't even think it belongs in the same repo. Just reorganizing, splitting them out of Wax, and making them a clearer path for users who do want them would be useful.

@shawnbot definitely agree on css. Makes sense to have a modestmaps-ui bundling modestmaps instead of vice versa, just for people who are somehow averse to two downloads/script tags or whatnot.

[tmcw]

Shell repo created - http://github.com/modestmaps/modestmaps-ui will manage issues there