Tiny World Map 3: Stealing Vertices From Fjords
Two weeks ago, we released tinyworldmap, a world map for offline-first and low-bandwidth web apps. It was originally developed as a simple offline fallback for OpenStreetMap tiles. The most complete version is only 450 kB gzipped.
With quite a few websites already using the map after two weeks, the reception was very positive. Still, it was clear that a less coarse map would be preferred. In the days following the release, people gently reminded us that both the Caspian Sea and the Great Lakes were shown as land, that many islands were missing, that half of our (not their, our) home country looked like it was about to drift into sea, and that some UK towns were already underwater.
Although the additional detail has resulted in a slightly bigger file (~450K gzipped), most of the vertices were obtained by smoothing sparsely populated areas with complex shorelines. We dedicated considerable effort to ensure the smoothed shores blend into the overall map style.
For every map layer, any property can be set on the canvas rendering context. More info can be found in our documentation. Of course, because the map is rendered client-side, excessive use of shadows, filters and textures will slow down older devices.
