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Sorry about that. Noticed the footnote was broken.

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

We don't have a marketing department, so we're happy to take suggestions on our messaging!

What makes it modern are the ideas behind it: the column-oriented layout, support for lightweight encodings such as FSST and FastPFOR and support for pre-tessellation. Also, enabling doing more computations on the GPU instead of the CPU, which are made possible thanks to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Metal. I agree that it is better to be specific about these things (if that is your gripe with it), but there's only so many characters that fit into a title. ;)

Although the word is overused, hindsight can be a huge advantage in design.

It should be backed up, for sure. Like how is this modern?

In this case it's the column format for attributes and the newer encodings. Things the industry wasn't doing a decade ago.

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/

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

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...

You can read more about why most web maps are like this and a quest to fix this in this article: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections

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.

Not everyone has a spherical monitor.

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