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It's become much easier to do this with the advent of tiled vector data and libraries like https://github.com/maplibre/geojson-vt

Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...

by bordercontrol6 hours ago|

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Thank you for the links. The postcode project I mentioned was 5 years ago. So this definitely didn't exist back then. Great to see such progress with these libraries.

Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back then.

by jaggederest17 hours ago|

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I'm confused, we did this on US Tiger line file data in 2006, rendering it on a early equivalent of Google Maps. You have to decimate the polygons to get them to render but doing bounding boxes around postcodes is fairly reasonable.

I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.

by bordercontrol6 hours ago|

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I was talking about runtime rendering. It's a bit of a hard topic to talk about, as there are a multitude of use cases and approaches.

But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.

by labcomputer15 hours ago|

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> Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.

Yup, lots of weird edge cases. For that one, you could also represent it with a multipoly.