Ideas for future development

Ideas for future development

This page is rather a 'grab bag' of possible directions that this project might extend in the future. It is most emphatically not to be interpreted as a promise to implement any of these - in fact, it would be better thought of as a plea for others to step forward and take some of these efforts on for themselves!

• Support the symbol=* tag

  One thing that is common in tagging for route relations is to include, with a symbol=* tag, an external link to a graphic file (ordinarily an SVG file) containing the route's symbol. It would be possible for the processing pipeline to respect this convention and render the specified symbol. In addition to working out simply how to wire this functionality in, due consideration would have to be given to legal considerations (what if a link is to a copyrighted or trademarked image?) and to security issues (what if an SVG file contains malicious content, such as an attempt to exploit a bug in an SVG renderer?). Perhaps a rough cut could be made by limiting the links to only specific sites (e.g., requiring that all symbol=* tags reference Wikimedia), but this idea certainly requires further thought.

• Support incremental update to the shield tables

  The current update pipeline cannot scale to handling the whole planet with minutely updates. There is no intrinsic roadblock, it's more a matter of developer time and priorities. There's a fuller discussion in the page that discusses maintaining the shield tables