I am working on a project that needs to display all the neighborhood polygons in Baltimore City at one time. The file is relatively detailed… which mean that tons of unnecessary polygon nodes are being sent from the backend, when, at the zoom level and the level of detail the map users need, the high level of detail is a total waste.
While there are some great hosted options to serve up complex GeoJSON, most of the time it is better served (no pun intended) to simplify your data. Unless you’re surveying or involved with some sort of lawyer, even a bit of generalization is a good idea with online mapping. Chris does a great job showing how you can modify the tolerance to get your results to look great and save lots of bandwidth. If you’re a generalization newbie, you should read his example and get a better understanding of how it works.
And if you’re an Esri user, the same concepts can be used in their stack as well.
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