Psamathe wrote:Interesting idea. I suppose the ideal would be that in addition to a zoom control you have a detail control/slider (except of course on smartphones you tend to use a pinch zoom rather than a slider or +/- buttons). But as you say pre-rendered must be somewhat more constrained. That said, I would have thought the pre-rendered must add things like campsites/supermarkets, etc. more as POIs so they can be "active" and clicking on them pops-up more details (rather than basing a click on a coordinate). As you are probably more aware than me on, MapOut uses vector mapping (rather than pre-rendered) so I guess they have more flexibility. But they also don't have the most powerful processor in the world and if they use it excessively then poor old battery suffers. (I think I was pointed to MapOut by one of your own posts as well).
(I may have got my terminology or understanding completely wrong in which case please fo feel free to correct me - no offence would be taken. I'd be learning stuff anyway).
No correction needed - you're pretty much there!
Making POIs clickable on pre-rendered OSM-based maps is harder, much harder than it ought to be - it's a missing piece in the standard OSM stack and no-one's fixed it (
https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile/issues/58 for what it's worth), partly because a lot of the big guys like Mapbox are moving towards client-based vector mapping.
Showing the right amount of information, clearly and attractively, at a given scale is pretty much the traditional art of cartography. Modern web-based cartography tends to sidestep the issue, either by saying "zoom in to see more", or by taking the Google approach, which is to consider the basemap as a neutral, low-detail canvas onto which search results can be superimposed in real time. That, I think, is why the Google basemap is so white and grey these days - Google doesn't really want to show you the roads, they want to show you the results of your search or navigation query.
I'm old-fashioned enough that I think it's still worth getting the basemap right. I do quite a lot of preprocessing in the cycle.travel cartography to that end - for example, there are different cartographical rules for rural areas, small towns and massive cities. But it's a dying art.