I have done some long-overdue refactoring of the Osmium code which simplifies Osmium itself and simplifies its use. And should make it faster to compile, because only those parts that are really needed are included.

After setting up the MapQuest Render Stack and poking around in its code I consider using it for the Multilingual Maps project. Unlike Tirex it can run on a cluster of machines for reliability and load distribution. That will be important for a tile server working on “Wikipedia scale”.

Whatever way we’ll develop for rendering the multilingual tiles, we have to get the information about which language(s) the user wants from the user to the tileserver. Web browsers typically support the selection of an ordered list of preferred languages. This list is sent through the Accept-Language header to the web server. We could use this setting to determine the language for the labels. But in some situations people might not know about this setting or can’t change it. Maybe they are sitting in an Internet cafe in a foreign country. In that case it might be easier for them if they can just change the language setting on the web page. This is especially interesting if the web site knows which languages are available and only shows those options. The browser setting doesn’t know anything about actually available languages, it just has one large master list.

Occasionally people ask me why there is no comment function on this blog. There are two answers for that: First, the software I use to create this blog does not support comments. My blog posts are “compiled” into static web pages that I then upload to my public site. This has many advantages. The site is fast, I don’t need a database around, the files are easy to backup and can be kept under version control. But mainly it means I can sleep soundly, because I don’t have to update Wordpress or some other blogging software every time a new security vulnerability is found.

If we want to render multilingual maps by separating the “label layers” from the “base layers” as described in my last blog post, we have to make sure the rendering results don’t change. Or, at least, that they do not look too bad. Lets look into that.