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by moron4hire 1526 days ago
Even better would be no image for the water tiles and set the background color of the container element.
3 comments
cyral 1526 days ago
Yeah I wonder why that isn't used... I can even remove the src from the image and add "background-color: #aad3de" and it looks exactly the same. I'd imagine it's also slightly faster and less memory intensive to render a static background color than to copy the data from an image.

I'm actually surprised they even use DOM nodes for this. Last I checked Google Maps uses a totally custom WebGL based renderer (since it supports 3D and such).

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rplnt 1526 days ago
> Yeah I wonder why that isn't used

It's extra handling in the client, request and traffic is still there. Saving few bytes for extra complexity is probably not worth it.

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Tabular-Iceberg 1526 days ago
I think they don’t want the tile server API have to think about what planet it’s on and where said planet has its oceans. So every tile has to have a valid image associated with it.
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moron4hire 1526 days ago
By the time that will be a concern, mapping apps will have been rewritten in JavaScript++ 5 times over.
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leephillips 1525 days ago
It’s been a concern for several years already. You can visit several planets and their satellites with Google Maps, at least.
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Lammy 1526 days ago
That might end up looking weird with a dark-mode extension like Dark Reader.
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atli-a 1526 days ago
Couldn't they just use css background-image property to load just one?
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