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. ;)

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.

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

FSST is similar in terms of underlying complexity. You need this complexity to get good performance though, it seems from the research.

If there were something better than FastPFOR, we would use it. If something comes up, we can always use a new tag and add it in the future.

There is still a lot to do, for example one can do like-operators on FSST without decompressing it.

and support in Geoserver

Thanks for the report. Should be fixed in a few hours once another of the project members approves https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre.github.io/pull/526

Globe view is a large feature that would require dedicated engineering effort. Currently, we don’t have funding allocated for this feature.

If you or your organization would like to

- sponsor (-> https://maplibre.org/sponsors) the work or

- contribute engineering time (-> https://maplibre.org/community/), we’d be happy to discuss options.

Feel free to reach out on Slack (invite at https://slack.openstreetmap.us/).

Sorry about that. Noticed the footnote was broken.

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

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/

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

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'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...

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.

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

Not everyone has a spherical monitor.