Faster, more efficient, more secure, and through the main entrance
Hello fellow mappers, here we go again! These are the changes that the website team made in the last month.
Interface
- We updated iD to v2.39.6, which fixes a validation issue and a crash. (@tyr_asd)
- On the Welcome page, the “Start Mapping” button is now more visible, which hopefully will reduce confusion to newcomers. (kcne)
- We tweaked the main navigation menu to make it more accessible to assistive technologies, and removed “clever” browser autocapitalisation where it hindered more than helped. (@pablobm)
- We updated some outdated links to the Wiki. (Adi-gitX)
- You can now filter languages by ISO code in the language selector. (el-Quokka)
- We found and fixed a couple of strings that were not translatable yet (one, two) (@pablobm, @hlfan)
- And finally, we merged a lot of work around cleaning up icons and illustrations, including making more efficient reuse of existing assets (one, two), reducing their size (one, two, three), tweaking the SVG pipeline, and de-duplicating code. (titanic effort by @hlfan!)
- Bonus: can you find where we sank Atlantis?
Data View
- When opening the data view of a feature, you may have noticed that you can click on the opening hours to see them on an evaluation tool. However this wasn’t working correctly. Well, it is now! (GA-Kevin-Codes)
- We now select appropriate logos from Wikidata depending on whether the website is showing in light or dark mode. (@hlfan)
Search and Directions
- We integrated the latest changes from Nominatim to show the correct admin levels in search results and route travelers to the entrances of features when they are tagged. (@lonvia)
- In a quirk of OSM English, we referred to fishmongers as selling “sea food”, which although not entirely incorrect, was a bit unexpected. We have now adopted the spelling “seafood”. (@amire80)
- We made the note search facility much faster. This is not available on the website, but some third party apps make us of it and will benefit. (@TomH)
Slippy Map
- We ported another map to MapLibre! This time it’s the embedded map you get when sharing as HTML. (@CommanderStorm)
- And ported another map to be vector-based: the Transport layer of the main map. (@TomH)
- Plus small code tweaks, such as removing some CSS that wasn’t serving any purpose, and adapting data structures. (@CommanderStorm, @hlfan)
Behind The Scenes
- Projects across all of OSM, and in fact the whole Open Source Software ecosystem, have in the last year had debates about the use of “Generative AI” tools. This month, the website maintainers opened a conversation on the topic, and we have published a first policy on AI-assisted contributions. We will continue to monitor this space. (@Andy_Allan)
- We received several security reports which have now been addressed, regarding our handling of TOTP cookies, our CSP rules, and a way that the rate limit of private messages could have been bypassed
(Pig-Tail, @TomH) - Like many projects out there, we have some automated tests that fail randomly. We continue work for them to behave consistently, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so
If anyone has ideas please let us know! (@hlfan) - On the topic of tests and CI, we have opened up the settings of GitHub actions so that contributors can run them in their forked repos. (@Andy_Allan)
- And tweaked a test factory to make it easier to use. (@pablobm)
- We continued the integration of the new notifications framework (one, two). (@TomH, @pablobm)
- We replaced a vendored dependency with a proper package. (@CommanderStorm)
- We cleaned up our HTML templates (one, two). (@TomH, @hlfan)
- And finally, we stopped official support for Ruby 3.2, which reached EOL recently. Going forward, the minimum supported Ruby version will be 3.3. (@TomH)