The Power of Vector Tiles

[Hungerburg (Asa Hundert)]

Reading along in another topic:

@mueschel

adding a switch for one or two additional styles would be easy - and it would serve as a perfect showcase for what can be done with vector tiles.

@SomeoneElse

I’d have thought that https://vector.openstreetmap.org/demo would be a possible place for that

I miss something. I understand, with a few lines of code, users can create new styles for vector tiles galore. How about something even more amenable to non-coding users: Sliders to define zoom levels for groups of features. On my mobile I can set a slider for “food and drinks” that will show restaurants rather early on, or later on, depending on my appetite at the moment. Same for a number of other kind of “amenities”.

As a coder myself, with limited experience, I’d say this needs some UI and some code that modifies the style “on-the-fly”. If the code should work with different tile providers, the grouping preferably included in the tiles in a standardized way so it can be learned by the UI.

And so on. Lots of finicky twists ahead.

PS: Would that mean, that in the vector future there be no more “canonical” reference for what is shown on osm.org?

[CeallachKN]

Vector-Styles are layer-based. You define your style by adding a layers for objects and when and in which look they appear.
Most styles layers are depending on other layers to “look good”, so from a visual standpoint that could be tricky.
Additionally dynamic layer-ordering in mapbox/maplibre-maps is still a PITA and as far as i know (I’m a bit out of the loop right now regarding these two) there wasn’t even an easy way to group layers together to define for example fixed “background”-layers.

Basically.. it is possible, via Javascript. I’ve done that myself, but always with an extremely limited number of layers / objects, because it gets error prone and annoying reaaally fast.

[dieterdreist (Martin Koppenhöfer)]

@Hungerburg

I understand, with a few lines of code, users can create new styles for vector tiles galore. How about something even more amenable to non-coding users: Sliders to define zoom levels for groups of features. On my mobile I can set a slider for “food and drinks” that will show restaurants rather early on, or later on, depending on my appetite at the moment. Same for a number of other kind of “amenities”.

to display a vector map you need a source with the data and a style that determines what is shown and how. To make the sliders work the data must be in the source. Depending on which zoom levels you want to see the detail your
idea can be feasible or not. There won’t be all amenities available in a zoom 6 tile (it would be too much data) but if you are ok with changing the visibility of restaurants from say zoom 17 to zoom 14 it would work without problems, because typically zoom 14 contains all the data for the higher zoom levels as well.

[Hungerburg (Asa Hundert)]

I understand. From the feedback on this topic I suppose the future is a gazillion of styles, e.g. dedicated styles for “restaurants” @ Z16,17,…,21 more plausible than a slider to unlock the power of vector tiles by enabling users to select what is of interest to them themselves (from the available data of course.)