No worries - I couldn't find it on trac so I thought I'd let you know.

http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html

Map first, create architecture only after it is clear it is needed.

Worse is better.

Yes, we could have concentrated on building better tools and forums that didn't have these redundancies and contradictions. But the truth is that if OSM had taken this approach we'd still be arguing about what tags to use and no mapping would have got done.

The OSM approach is that getting data into the database is the primary consideration and we need to lower the barrier for that to happen. Making everything neat & tidy can come later.

Small world - we were cycling round Sandy Balls last Wednesday evening, as it happens!

The bylaws say that you are only meant to cycle in the New Forest on the waymarked routes (on the gravel tracks). But erosion is generally caused by ponies and water rather than cyclists, so that's unlikely to be a problem: and there's plenty of space, it's not like the problem of meeting dog walkers and stiles on a narrow country footpath through fields.

The maps tiles at different zoom levels are generated at different times...

I did find the recipe for doing hill shading in the end

osm.wiki/HikingBikingMaps#Hill_Shading

Apologies if this doesn't interest you!

The main thing is that London looks rather strange without the Thames at the moment. But it does give some idea of relief elsewhere in the country. I don't know if anyone has a set of base tiles with shaded relief from the SRTM data?

I guess you'd need waterway=riverbank/river.

Wonderful work. I wonder would it be possible to render water features on the map to give a bit more context?

Now that Kosmos can generate aeronautical charts, there's probably a good reason to have this data...

osm.wiki/index.php/Kosmos_AirNav_Rules

The coastlines are done as a separate process, you'll have to wait a while before your changes to the coast polygon are propagated to the slippy map.

Here's some more info
osm.wiki/Coastline

NPE maps work pretty well for rural areas: I've been filling in some gaps in Hampshire and Wiltshire using them and local knowledge.

Eventually it might be nice to have a thing similar to the noname layer so we can print out maps which show the roads which don't have a GPS trace: then we can bag them easily.

To be honest, being accurate to within 400m represents pretty good progress.

It would be nice if you could search for more of the partial postcode: for instance there are postboxes listed in "SO16 7" but if I put "SO16 7" in the search box no matches are found.

For what it's worth if the aerial mapping is out by 15-20' then it's likely to be the aerial mapping which is aligned badly - particularly in areas where there aren't many features. If you view all the GPS tracks for the road and take an average that is far more accurate generally.