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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Can someone elaborate on the word "slippy" in this context? It seems to refer[0] to maps that can be dragged and zoomed. But isn't that all digital maps?

The first one I've interacted with was Google Maps almost two decades ago, which seems to meet the criteria (as well as every alternative I have tried). So I'm not sure what a non-slippy map would be like (or why the word is a necessary qualifier in this context).

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map

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Slippy maps is the baseline nowadays but it wasn’t always.

Example video showing terraserver: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uaQNdMQ3NNk

As others mentioned there are also many maps meant for printing. There are also map servers that will generate a viewport-specific image (typically meaning no on-the-fly rendering) on demand.

Author here! I used the world slippy, possibly out of context, to refer to a generic map using remote vector or raster tiles.

Maybe it's easier to define what I don't mean by a "generic slippy map": https://play.abstreet.org/0.3.37/abstreet.html

This website is effectively a very powerful game engine (written in Rust and compiled to wasm) running in the browser - I can't easily add a GeoJSON ovrlay, or geolocation, or other web map patterns.

The "street explorer" demo (https://a-b-street.github.io/osm2streets/#18.37/-33.88071/15...) loads a slippy map (OpenStreetMap) and then loads in a debug segment of the map data.

It's come to mean interactive maps web maps, usually tiled image based. This is still a very specific thing in GIS where most published maps are still static documents - and often meant for printing on large format printers in the ALEC world.

i always associate slippy with draggable or pinch and zoomable, unlike the super annoying maps with arrow navigation and zoom levels.

but i guess as long as it's tiled it's slippy

“Slippy” was coined by the early OpenStreetMap community (specifically Steve Coast, I think) to mean draggable. It was in contrast with the previous generation of webmaps which had buttons for panning N/S/E/W, each of which would trigger a new page load with a new set of tiles.

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