[Doctor_Fegg]

Open-source vector renderers don't yet have the cartographic chops that raster renderers do.

The most glaring difference is that label placement in common vector renderers is generally "try once, fail if no room", whereas in Mapnik (standard raster renderer), for example, you can supply a list of positions to try in order of preference.

There's a lot to like about client-side rendering (which is why I wrote https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/ to generate vector tiles) but it's not up to feature parity with raster rendering yet, and for some of us those features are important.

[scardine]

This is true, but I'm not a cartographer. I know enough to appreciate a well rendered map but it is not my job.

In fact most of the time I can get way with just a vector layer over a 3rd party tile layer using Leaflet and some fancy fireworks showing labels on click/hover events.

I'm really glad I don't need to render tiles in the server side anymore but I remember the time when I had not choice but manage my own tile server simply because many clients could not handle something simple like a choropleth map with all the voting districts in my state.