Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

1) It's not. Maplibre is a JS library for displaying map data. OpenStreetMap is a collection of map data that is published in various formats. Different levels of the stack.

2) It's an optimization/advancement. There are some pain points in the older version that 10 years of experience can fix in a newer format.

3) Attention, funding. Technically, they're at the leading edge of open source.

View on HN

Additionally to point 2, the older format was created by a company (Mapbox) that used to be open source-friendly but has recently made a larger pushback against open source and open standards, changing the licenses of much of their formerly open source work. (The Maplibre JS library itself is a fork of that company's previous open source work from its last open source drop to keep the work open source.)

> There are some pain points in the older version that 10 years of experience can fix in a newer format.

What were the major pain points? Compression ratio and speed seem like two of them. (Thanks for answering the elementary questions.)

Lack of tessellation was a big one. In many cases you'd rather have the polygons pre-tessellated in the file format. Now you can. Or you can avoid doing that and save the bytes.

The format is also designed to slide onto the GPU more easily. If you're writing a vector map from scratch, I say just do MLT.

There was never any support for more complex geometry. Now someone could add curves.

Attributes had to be fairly simple. Now you could conceivably do hierarchical attributes.

The requirements for navigation data tiles get specific and weird (from a visual perspective). Now it can be added without breaking existing data.

Thanks, @wirefool :-)

> OpenStreetMap is a collection of map data that is published in various formats.

So, OpenStreetMap.org is just one site which uses the "real" OpenStreetMap, which is the data?

The data can be downloaded here: https://planet.osm.org/ Here's a list of OSM data users: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com