Note that the demotiles style is not really comparable to a production basemap such as ones based on the popular OpenMapTiles schema. The article linked in the announcement has some more findings related to compression ratio.

Also note that lightweight encodings are built into the format, and different tiles can even be encoded in a completely different way. So you have to use heuristics to find the best combination of encodings and often you need to make a trade off between tile size and decoding performance. It is still early days for MLT, but all this means there are a lot of possibilities for optimization. In fact, AWS is again financing work on MLT this year, with a focus on optimization.

Lastly, when benchmarking tile size, it is good to look at actual usage patterns instead of size of the total tile set. Nobody is zooming into a random spot in the ocean, for example. ;-)

PMTiles is actually pretty agnostic to what kind of tiles it contains! There is already a PMTiles PR that updates the byte that specifies the type of tile to include MLT.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/pull/596

PMtiles is often used with MVT tiles, but it can encapsulate a variety of tile types: the current spec [1] has defined tile types for MVT, PNG, JPEG, WebP and AVIF (plus "Unknown/Other").

[1]: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/main/spec/v3/spec....

I'm building PMTiles through Tilemaker, PMTiles is incredible, but sadly it will take a lot of work to produce MLT though Tilemaker :/

Oh pmtiles is such a simple and innovative solution!

This 100%

We've been self-hosting protomaps (aka pmtiles) for several years. The only thing you need server-side is a web server that can serve static files and supports range requests (so anything works; I've tried caddy and nginx). The map is one large file, it's easy to share it between however many servers you need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started

Downsides? Nothing major that I can think of. You have to add another client-side dependency (support for their custom protocol); the library is pretty small and easy to audit.

Editing map styles is slightly more difficult because generic maplibre styles won't work with it: they add a bit of custom sauce on top. IIRC this editor worked fine, you can import one of protomaps styles and base your work off it:

https://maputnik.github.io/editor

That's probably it.

We use mod_tile+renderd: https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile

In short: We have a script that builds a pbf of the area we are interested in (Colorado, USA) from OSM, then set up a openstreetmap-tile-server container with that data, bring in our styles, and then set up renderd.

Sorry about that. Noticed the footnote was broken.

Fixed the footnote, broke all other links. Should be OK again when the caches catch up.

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.

The key info token you'll want to know as someone foreign to map topics is that maplibre is a licence continuity fork of the formerly open source Mapbox code.

Everything else pretty much derives from this, e.g. yeah, OSM did not suddenly go all in on former mapbox stuff only because the company started keeping updates behind a paywall, OSM continues to be as tool-agnostic as ever.

I’m not sure it’s very useful to rehash an argument with very tenuous relation to the OP here. The normal reason to use the Mercator projection in these situations is (a) it’s what people are used to and (b) it preserves angles so if you zoom in on a street then up will still be north and roads that are at right angles in the real world appear to be at right angles on the map. The latter property is pretty desirable and hard to achieve without doing some weird transition between projections as you zoom. This matters more for Europe (and I suppose parts of British Colombia) where there is a high population density at latitudes that are pretty extreme in much of the world.

I think Apple Maps has a pretty reasonable compromise here of transitioning from a globe to Mercator as you zoom, but this is a less nice UI with a mouse as you need to click to rotate the globe instead of pointing and zooming only. I don’t think there’s anything in this data that would make that unachievable – you just need to reproject the vector data a bit as you zoom out – but it takes some tricky mathematics to get right and so hasn’t been done yet.

It's on our roadmap to support alternate projections, but as you can imagine it's a big project that so far nobody has been willing to pay for to implement unfortunately.

MapLibre GL JS does support globe mode. https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-... May we should update our examples to use globe mode when showing examples, especially those that show a world map. We will take that feedback into consideration!

You can use the Equal Earth projection with a plugin: https://equal.bbox.earth/maplibre-americas/

It's actually worse than that because the Web Mercator projection is unusable for navigation too - it doesn't preserve angles or area! (Angles are nearly preserved).

Well done Google. Slow handclap.

The NGA advised it's likely to cause geolocation errors of up to 40km near the poles:

https://www.gpsworld.com/nga-issues-advisory-notice-on-web-m...

Web Mercator is the standard projection used on the web, if you think the we should use a different projection on the web then that's a completely separate argument

Accuracy where it matters is why. Do you have a better suggestion for projecting a sphere onto a rectangle?

Web mercator is fantastic map. It's well known of course, so very helpful to orient. Plus, its square and easily tile-able, which is good for performance. Shapes of countries are preserved. Plus, the lines are straight, which works great for on screen. Neat and tidy.

Who cares Greenland looks big when zoomed out. "Mercator distorts size" is one of those gis-nerd idee fixes, the first factoid they learn in class, and it overwhelms all thought.

You're a bit hasty, for the users that needs mercator projections, they should be able to get it, see: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/API/type-aliases/Pr...

Because that's what everyone is used to.

Maplibre supports different projections if you want.

obligatory West Wing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY