There's a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org | Hacker News Reader

There's a new map style on OpenStreetMap.org

en.osm.town

435 pointsgslin75 comments

While I love OSM the layers are bad UX. Currently the main site ( https://www.openstreetmap.org ) displays 7 layers:

- Standard -- OK, lets say this the universal default. The name is a quite non-descriptive, why not call it roads? Or driving?

- CyclOSM -- Why not call it cycle map? This is some internal project name?

- Cycle map -- duplicate, why does it need 2?

- Transport map -- What kind of transport? Call it "Public Transport".

- Tracestrack Topo -- no idea what this means.

- OVPNKarte -- again no idea. Looks like another public transport map. Why does it need 2?

- Humanitarian -- Here I have really no idea. Is this for disaster relief personnel, so it displays hospitals and such?

OSM presentation configurations are a bit like Linux distributions (only much, much smaller): yes, having more than one causes a lot of seemingly avoidable mental load, but there is little doubt that the design by committee implied by a single version would be much worse.

Give people the option to create, import and export their own on the official site, and a means for browsing a catalog of them. You can infer how good they are (and thus their ranking) by how many interactions are made with the map or something, or just use a rating system that can be done anonymously.

No design by committee, and no random, unclear layers for the average user.

The map on osm.org is leaflet based, pre-rendered png tiles. Each theme is a huge global tile pyramid, and because they are osm and not some random osm redistributor they better have those pyramids refreshed quite frequently. No, you don't simply create a "themehub" platform on the side.

I agree the "what it is for" of each layer could be improved. Digging up the wiki [1], there's (I'm aggregating the content of "significance" and "uniqueness"table):

- Standard: "Attempts to do many things at once (Jack of all trades, master of none)"

- CyclOSM: "Contour lines. Cycle map. World coverage"

- Cycle Map: "Contour lines. "Focuses on bicycle features, shows bicycle routes"

- Transport Map: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- ÖPNVKarte: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- Humanitarian: "Focuses on the developing countries with an emphasis on features related to development and humanitarian work. Good contrasting style in terms of overall colour choices. Terrain shading. Many new/different icons (particularly for basic amenities in developing countries) and more nuanced surface track-type rendering. "

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers

Thanks for this. Turns out I'm not just stupid.

https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/ allows to compare 250 map styles, up to 8 per page (selector is bottom right of page). I'd like to see the snow map, rail infrastructure and power infrastructure map (https://openinframap.org/) added but it'd be overwhelming.

Default site is primary for mappers.

"ÖPNV" (Öffentlicher PersonenNahVerkehr) is the German abbreviation for "public transport". And "Karte" <-> "map"

Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/54.2375/-4.6695&layers...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/13.9394/-61.0785&layer...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/16.7342/-62.1730&layer...

Topography and map don't match up for Fairway Rock

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/65.6235/-168.7505&laye...

Some islands are not named at any zoom level

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/49.629/-126.381&layers=...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/63.273/-170.184&layers=...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/71.253/-179.604&layers=...

Are these new problems or pre-existing problems?

You can click the "layers" button on the side to see how it looks in other layers. For the Isle of Man, other layers only show the name once, or don't show it at all at that close of a zoom level.

Actually the standard layer also says "Isle of Man" twice at a certain zoom

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/54.1624/-4.5071

> Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

That seems correct and desirable? They're two distinct things that happen to coincide. Just like a street with a name might also be part (or the entirety) of a numbered route, and we'd want the map to show both.

That seems correct in theory but it is inconsistent between islands - I suspect it's to do with adminstrative levels differing between different nations.

e.g. With the first example - Isle of Man - you won't see the same happen with either Great Britain or Ireland, nor with smaller adjacent islands. The labels font-sizes & zoom behaviour are also very different between Northern Ireland and Ireland - the UK having countries within a country and adding an extra admin level in the hierarchy. Isle of Man being a crown dependency could be a factor I guess, or something similar.

Ultimately this seems fine to me though: representing areas locally for each locality is by definition inconsistent.

Great Britain isn’t the national name. It is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Great Britain is the name of the island - this comment is about islands.

can this issue be solved without introducing ambiguity?

I mean the first one

> Islands which are also states say the name of the island twice at certain zoom levels.

Nice. Here's a direct link to view San Francisco using Tracestack Topo: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/37.7846/-122.4304&laye...

Have been using https://opentopomap.org for this for a while, and depending on what you're looking for it still has some advantages: does show the numbers on all height lines (osm only does the 50m one in my area for some reason, leaving you to guess whether the next one is 40m or 60m since that is not always obvious - seems like a key thing for a topographic map), does show the house numbers.

What’s the explanation for the Martian look at z≤8?

e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/40/-111&layers=P

And it looks like this is a proprietary fork of Carto? Its inclusion on the OSM website is essentially an advertisement?

If you zoom out all the way you can see color corresponds with elevation. Reddish is highish elevation.

View it on a 3D globe here: https://www.tracestrack.com/#features

This is really cool!

Though I find myself looking for a provider of geocoding and navigation for a freelance project of mine.

I know that I could probably self-host OSRM and OpenMapTiles, but the hardware requirements make using a cloud service feel easier.

At the same time I can't really decide between something like Mapbox and MapTiler (or possibly even cheaper alternatives that I don't know about), since a lot of the APIs feel a bit vendor locked.

On the other hand, it's nice how many options there are, even though the industry feels like it's moving towards vector tiles which perform mich worse for me, albeit look better.

Crosswalks still look the same as sidewalks :(

The layer seems closed source, or at least not developed out in the open, so you can't easily file a bug I think.

I love osm, but the raster generators are not well documented.

I want to just make my own raster map for a limited area and it's not trivial to do.

So the data is open, but the software is either not free or too hairy or poorly documented so you can pay them to use it.

It's still better than Google map.

Is this not good? (Genuine question if you tried it. I never used it, I just had it bookmarked because the README looked good.)

https://github.com/enzet/map-machine

This looks nice, unlike Google's recent decision to completely redo their colors to look like Apple's terrible, faded colors.

In my parents' car, the screen doesn't exactly have high dynamic range, and for some reason Google Maps colors are white on white, impossible to tell where the streets are looking at the screen during the day.

That's Google design these days. White on light white on sightly darker white.

Apparently it's modern and people have thought about it. I guess those people wear sunglasses all day.

I keep telling this at my Google maps when I use it as satnav in my car. I'm trying to count which right it is, but I don't see the side streets as they are white with a light grey border on off white. Infuriating. Give me my neon green, purple and black.

These situations are not the same btw. Not sure if you know, but this style was added as an option in the layers menu. You can use whatever style you like!

The reason they use such light, poor contrast colors is that the map is used as a background for things like business ads, the blue navigation line, etc. Yes in the process, it becomes useless as an actual map for looking at.

I just wish it displayed buildings at zoom 16(today at 17, while default OSM renderer at 15). And similar for addresses displayed currently at 19, I wish it was at 18, while OSM default renderer displays at 17.

For some reason, the Tracestrack Topo layer doesn't load for me in firefox.

Loads for me Firefox/Windows.

.. and me FF/Linux.

Parent might like to examine their extensions/network/life choices. I block a shit load of stuff and bizarrely a mapping system used and generated by millions of people just seems to work.

This didn't look very pretty but I still got the menus 8)

    $ links "https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.93675/-2.63421&layers=P"

Same here, I get 403s from tile.tracestrack.com

Edit: I think it's due to referrer filtering. I can load the tiles fine if I pass 'Referer: https://www.openstreetmap.org', but Firefox sends 'Referer: tile.tracestrack.com'. Presumably that's a measure to preserve privacy, possibly due to some extension (though I've disabled various adblock, tracking protection things...)

What do you use to suppress the referer header?

For my job, I needed to know whether to dissuade a customer from using the referrer for CSRF protection. I looked for stats on how many people filter this but could find nothing at all. You're the first person I hear runs this in practice, so maybe I can find usage stats on the software you use. Secondarily, I'd be curious how often you run into trouble!

It's a feature of uMatrix that's enabled by default

I block referrer headers on Firefox 102.15.1esr; although I use uBlock Origin, for the headers I just set 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' in about:config. There are very few occasions when things don't work. Perhaps once in a week's worth of browsing the Web I'll come across a Cloudflare site that doesn't like me, and these new OpenStreetMap tiles worked yesterday but don't today.

Thanks, changing that setting in uMatrix worked for me.

Same for me, Firefox on Linux. Getting 403's

It does work for me FF/Linux.

Does this work?

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.9349/-2.6296&layers=P

You should end up with a view of a small town in South Somerset, UK.

Nope, grey Screen. But like another one commented, I also have the same referrer. I also saw that I somewhat locked down 3rd-party cookies and the tile request doesn't have any cookies. This might be another reason (I haven't checked if there should be a cookie there though)

I use Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin in the browser and pfBlocker-ng at the router - that is similar to PiHole.

You mention "I also have the same referrer" - I'm not too sure what that means.

It sounds like you might want to go easy on the funky stuff. Cookies are not totally evil!

Looks like bmicraft might have the answer:

> It's a feature of uMatrix that's enabled by default

And I don't think uMatrix is all that funky. It works on all other sites, after all(rarely I have to allow-all, but that seemingly does not include the Referer: header)

Works on Firefox Android with uBO enabled.

Works in Firefox on Linux with uBO, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, from a German IP address if that makes a difference...

(Tacking more onto uBO reminds me of the dutch/german game where you start by saying "I go on holiday and bring... a book", then the next person has to repeat and tack on one item, and so on, until someone forgets an item. I couldn't quickly find if this exists in english.)

The game seems to exist in many countries/languages.

The reason I was including the extension was because these problems people have with websites usually com down to the extensions they use. At least I don't remember a site not working after opening it in private browsing or if that doesn't help a seperate browser with a different engine.

Yeah I understand why it was included, that's also why I added mine :). Sorry if that came across as making fun of your reply!

That's neat. It seems like it isn't available in OsmAnd though, sadly.

OSM is basically a dataset. Everybody renders this dataset differently unless they are sharing a renderer. Android apps such as Maps.ME and OsmAnd do their own vector renders.

I think it might be possible via the Online Maps feature by adding an online source, but for that I'd need the url of the source. For example, I can pick CyclOSM as the map tile source both in OsmAnd and on openstreetmap.org.

That would defeat the purpose of having a vector map app.

...and add all the benefits of having online slippy maps, yes, nice way of telling the full story

I enable this when I want to zoom to a random place in the world without first downloading a 600MB map file, want satellite imagery, or indeed want to view different styles. I wish there was better integration, like being able to also search worldwide with online services when this view is enabled (but it's also not like I got time to implement that myself so I can understand nobody else has gotten around to yet, either).

As far as I know there is no significant overlap between this two: except that both use OpenStreetMap data as source.

It's odd given that OsmAnd is the most feature complete OSM app for Android that there are so few custom map styles for it. I know the weird format it uses is a contributing factor (I think everyone else uses Mapnik compatible styles). But I find all the included themes really hideous and haven't found a good alternative. There are really good raster styles for outdoor use, so if anyone has advice on adapting an existing theme for OsmAnd I'd be curious to hear about that.

OsmAnd already has a way of showing elevation in the same manner

It looks beautiful especially the way altitude is displayed, on large scale the colors look great and when zooming in you get detailed shadows.

Can somebody ELI5 what hierarchical place rendering in China is?

It looks awesome!

so, how does one use osm for turn by turn navigation on an android phone?

I installed OSMand via f-droid and I did not find it very readable

OSMand is powerful but the UI can ve overwhelming. Organic maps seem popular https://organicmaps.app/ but I prefer the style of Mapy.cz https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy

Doesn't seem to have a license in the attribution overlay. Is this not CC-BY-SA like the rest? Is it served by Tracestack? Can you use it in very small FOSS apps without API keys?

It looks really nice visually though.

To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.

Works for me. Are you using a web browser? While a webapp client is provided for convenience, upon request, this is a social media site, not a website; there is no canonical HTML representation, so don't be surprised when you don't get one.

Try specifying

  Accept: application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"

in your request.

I don't think that logic holds: Nitter can render an HTML representation just fine. It's not because it's a "social media site" that there cannot be an HTML+CSS representation.

Anyway I don't think disabling javascript wholesale is workable these days, so complaining about that is not very constructive (i.e. I sort of agree with you). Especially for open source products, those people should feel free to contribute or sponsor a non-JS version rather than complaining to volunteers to do a ton of extra work for what I suspect is literally no more than a few dozen people on the globe (particularly with noncommercial software like mastodon which isn't going to be annoying when JS is turned on).

I should start complaining that sites don't look nice with CSS disabled :P (Sometimes I turn css off using an extension to avoid the rules that make the text thin+gray on a grayish background.)

> those people should feel free to contribute or sponsor a non-JS version

It will be rejected. Mastodon used to have a good HTML view with progressive enhancement for logged-out users. But in v4.0 they replaced it with the same React app as the loggin-in users, to lower the maintenance cost.

Oh, that's a bit disappointing, but yeah understandable if you'd otherwise break the HTML view all the time and you can't let the noscript crowd take care of that independently :(

They could have kept the HTML view as the only public view. It would benefit everyone, as it was faster than the react app. Instead they now have to keep backporting security fixes to the 3.5.x branch for admins who don't want to force the new view on their users. (Well, the 3.5.x branch will stop getting security updates in three months, we'll see how many admins will still refuse to update to 4.x.x then.)

> Nitter can render an HTML representation just fine.

And you could fairly easily make a Nitter-equivalent for ActivityPub.

> I should start complaining that sites don't look nice with CSS disabled :P

Unironically, do.

To anyone at Mastodon reading this, I cannot read this article without turning JavaScript on! Yes, I've read your message to that effect many times.

I can turn on JavaScript but I won't, especially for you Mastodon—because you portray yourselves as an alternative to those services such as Google, Facebook, MS, etc. that use JS for nefarious purposes.

If you were truly acting as an alternative and acting in good faith then you wouldn't enforce the large and slow overhead of JavaScript onto users without also offering a JS-free option. Moreover, JS is also a security liability which makes your action even worse.

Sure, offer JavaScript to those who prefer to use it, and to those who don't know how to turn it off, but to enforce its use is really a form of discrimination—discrimination against those of us who've been arguing for an alternative to Big Tech for years.

The web's been rendered an utter mess because of JavaScript—not because of the language per se—but because of those who've its power to abuse and abuse and disadvantage web users for their own ends—we've now reached the point where many of us find the web almost unusable.

Mastodon, you've let the side that's fighting for a better web down.

Shame on you!

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