Nowt for time and an astrolabe anyone?

take a page from Polynesians and their etak view of the world – everything was local.

Still…there are applications where this is not the case, weather maps for example. It would be nice if the regional or continental maps were in a more appropriate projection, but that would require work and investment, and since nobody is clamoring for it or paying for it, the offerings sink to the lowest acceptable level, i.e., put it all in lat/long unprojected or Mercator.

I know from experience that a map of New York City’s five boroughs in unprojected lat/long (i.e. on a Cartesian, or is Platte Carre projection?) hardly raises an eyebrow here, even though everything looks skewed to me!

As it happens, we have a series of articles due for publication in a few weeks covering these subjects. They will end with a demonstration web site and how-to that shows you how to do a better job. (yes the demo website is not designed for zooming in to individual cities where these issues are generally not of concern)

Things only fall apart when looking at the whole world at once (or trying to look at the poles), but that’s not the primary use case for these maps, I would argue (perhaps unconvincingly).

Is it not more reasonable to see more data presented on a familiar ground that is widely known and accepted, or should we make multiple allowances to accomodate a minority view?

It’s a free web, people. If you’d like to use something else, go ahead. I like that the ‘big uns’ are using Gerry’s view…the angles look pretty good in the area where i live. If it were up to me, I’d have to say I like Bucky’s Dymaxionic.

But even if we can agree that ‘one projection fits for all’ is not a best approach, we have to consider that supporting 2 projections for web map services means setting up 2 caches (because don’t even dream about Google Maps-like performance if you re-project on-the-fly), which is a huge burden in terms of infrastructure.

Who will invest massive amounts of money to cover it without strong operational justification? (and I’m affraid ‘to be fair with everybody in the way we represent the world’ is not a strong operational justification).