What are your thoughts about geodetic grids? Do you think they will be able to take over the tyranny of EPSG:3857 tiles? Could protobuf geodetic hextiles be a thing?
Engineer at Mapbox, creator of Leaflet, open source enthusiast, algorithms geek, speaker, singer-songwriter (Obiymy Doschu), father of twin girls, Ukrainian
Probably not taking over any time soon; at least for traditional web maps.
The sheer simplicity of Mercator tiles is hard to beat. This is perhaps the biggest driver in the popularity of any software technology.
The algorithms that power geospatial databases are designed for rectangular queries, and dealing with hexes would bring a lot of performance overhead.
Since most existing mapping software works with Mercator tiles, you don't have to deal with compatibility issues.
99% mapping use cases only need accuracy at higher zoom levels, and don't deal with data around poles, so there's not enough incentive to switch to harder solutions.
However, I'd love for you and others to keep experimenting on that front, regardless of the current status quo — that's how progress happens after all. :)
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What are your thoughts about geodetic grids? Do you think they will be able to take over the tyranny of EPSG:3857 tiles? Could protobuf geodetic hextiles be a thing?
Probably not taking over any time soon; at least for traditional web maps.
However, I'd love for you and others to keep experimenting on that front, regardless of the current status quo — that's how progress happens after all. :)