Last week I talked about data formats and we continued it on Twitter.
No curves. It’s a good point. GeoJSON and TopoJSON don’t support curves. But neither does Shapefiles. All three formats are meant to handle simple features. Points, polygons and line. Whereas TopoJSON handles topology, it still can’t draw true curves. But what’s the implication here? To share data that requires curves (it’s an edge case but still an important one) you have to use a proprietary format? Enter WKT. Well-known text supports much more vector types than the previous including curves. Following up on sharing data in common file formats, WKT fits the bill perfectly. Share your data as GeoJSON/TopoJSON, KML and Shapefile if needed, then use WKT for complex features. Still open completely and it is well supported with most open and proprietary software packages.
Sometimes you need to use curves and generally it does work out.
