Yes, in principle it is feasible. I slapped one together back when the tile server was in testing. Unfortunately, it would currently be difficult to integrate an interactive debug overlay directly into the main osm.org homepage, because the maplibre-gl-leaflet compatibility shim gets in the way of any interactivity. We’d need to migrate to MapLibre GL JS for real in order to support a lot of the interactive features that people desire from vector tile technology:
If you’ve been following this effort for a while, you might’ve seen this tile demo page appear late last year. As a temporary workaround, here’s an idea for repurposing that page as a QA tool for the OSMF-produced tiles:
This should be straightforward:
As I understand it, the OSMF has so far funded the implementation of a minutely vector tile service. By itself, this is a big deal, but the raw tiles are only useful to software developers. The Shortbread layer – with the VersaTiles Colorful stylesheet and soon the Eclipse stylesheet for dark mode users – is a minimal approach to delivering the tiles in a more usable format for mappers. Developing a custom schema and style requires a lot of time and effort and hard decisions. Think of this style as a placeholder and hopefully motivation for ambitious mapmakers to contribute their efforts toward more featured styles.
The MapTiler OMT style is one of at least half a dozen ports of the OSM Carto design to vector stylesheet technology at varying stages of completion. This allows the designers to skip a lot of difficult cartographic decisions by copying an existing style, leaning on our familiarity with that style. However, raster and vector technology have different strengths and weaknesses. If a vector style copies OSM Carto too literally, it could fall into an uncanny valley: not quite achieving OSM Carto’s look and feel while also foregoing the many advantages of vector technology. Hopefully these styles’ designers will eventually go beyond their predecessors and innovate new approaches. In the same way, OSM Americana pays homage to paper maps, which have obvious technical constraints, while continuing to experiment with features that paper maps never had.
Inconsistency like that would most likely be a tile server issue. (In the span of a few hours, this thread has already touched on naming and cache invalidation, which is basically all of computer science!)
I don’t think we have a dedicated issue tracker for the tile server, so you could report the problem in the operations team’s main issue tracker. If that isn’t the right place, the operations team can move it to a different repository.
According to this comment, the $VERSION is actually the style’s name and version, for example, shortbread_v1 for the currently deployed version of the Shortbread layer’s style. You can see this if you monitor the osm.org homepage in your browser’s network inspector. Another issue you’ll run into is that the stylesheet is invalid out of the box unless you turn relative paths into absolute URLs.
At vector zoom level 5 (raster z6), the Shortbread tiles only contains the cities you saw labeled, shown here as red dots:
