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I don't understand. There were loads of online maps before Google maps and they all used tiles. How else would you do it? What Google added was smooth pannin

I don't understand. There were loads of online maps before Google maps and they all used tiles. How else would you do it? What Google added was smooth panning between tiles, pretty much as soon as native browser technology was up to the job. If they hadn't someone else would have.

0110101001 1y ago
> How else would you do it? Render a viewport, given an API like mining/maxing/minlat/maxlat.
- masfuerte 1y ago
  Fair enough, but these were solutions that worked without js, and they weren't dynamically rendering maps on the front or back end. They were just showing squares of pre-rendered bitmap, and the square boundaries were fixed. If your point of interest was near an edge it could be quite annoying, like trying to navigate somewhere in the gutter of a paper atlas. Even if they'd had an API that took a viewport, the result would have been stitched together from bitmap tiles because that's what they had. It seems like the "invention" of tiles for maps must have happened as soon as anyone starting using a computer to render maps to bitmaps. The Ordnance Survey wouldn't at any point have rendered the entire UK to a single bitmap (at least not a map with any detail). It would have always been tiled. Edited to add: Actually, the invention was much earlier than that. Paper maps were tiled before computers were a thing. And this would naturally have carried over to computer-rendered maps.
thrance 1y ago
Yes, to me it's the canonical way to represent maps on a computer, that anyone could come up with after spending a bit of time pondering the question. And it looks rather straightforward to implement, probably a bit less so with ancient browser tech.
duskwuff 1y ago
> How else would you do it? Read latitude/longitude/zoom parameters from the request and render a map image on demand. It's slow and inefficient, but it's simple to implement and I suspect it's what most of the first-generation mapping services did.

0110101001 1y ago

> How else would you do it? Render a viewport, given an API like mining/maxing/minlat/maxlat.

masfuerte 1y ago
Fair enough, but these were solutions that worked without js, and they weren't dynamically rendering maps on the front or back end. They were just showing squares of pre-rendered bitmap, and the square boundaries were fixed. If your point of interest was near an edge it could be quite annoying, like trying to navigate somewhere in the gutter of a paper atlas. Even if they'd had an API that took a viewport, the result would have been stitched together from bitmap tiles because that's what they had. It seems like the "invention" of tiles for maps must have happened as soon as anyone starting using a computer to render maps to bitmaps. The Ordnance Survey wouldn't at any point have rendered the entire UK to a single bitmap (at least not a map with any detail). It would have always been tiled. Edited to add: Actually, the invention was much earlier than that. Paper maps were tiled before computers were a thing. And this would naturally have carried over to computer-rendered maps.

thrance 1y ago

Yes, to me it's the canonical way to represent maps on a computer, that anyone could come up with after spending a bit of time pondering the question. And it looks rather straightforward to implement, probably a bit less so with ancient browser tech.

duskwuff 1y ago

> How else would you do it? Read latitude/longitude/zoom parameters from the request and render a map image on demand. It's slow and inefficient, but it's simple to implement and I suspect it's what most of the first-generation mapping services did.