Comment by bottled_poe
10 hours ago
Accuracy where it matters is why. Do you have a better suggestion for projecting a sphere onto a rectangle?
10 hours ago
Accuracy where it matters is why. Do you have a better suggestion for projecting a sphere onto a rectangle?
I would not use such strong rhetoric as the GP, but I believe they probably mean we should lean towards using the Gall/Peters projection, which maintains lengths and areas, but not angles.
(There are of course other projections with other interesting features; or you could take the same projection but center the world differently etc.)
Why? Why is lengths and areas more important than angles? You have to choose one, its essentially arbitrary. Personally I find it more useful to know what is parallel to what and what is at which angles from what, than some size. We have globes, so we know what the "real size" of Greenland looks like... this has always been a silly argument from the overzealous online looking for right wrongs that don't exist.
WEB MERCATOR DOES NOT PRESERVE ANGLES.
2 replies →
Web Mercator does not preserve angles.
We're currently forced to use a projection that is strictly worse than what it was based on, the Mercator projection, created in 1569.
Everyone on this thread needs to read this presentation entitled "Use Literally Anything But Web Mercator":
https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/events/conf...
Let's say that a bit louder shall we:
USE LITERALLY ANYTHING BUT WEB MERCATOR.
This comment is inaccurate! Web Mercator causes such large errors in geolocation that the NGA had to issue an advisory about it [1].
There is a whole science behind map projections and Google ignored it entirely when they created Web Mercator, which was a hack to divide the world into a quad tree. It was vaguely clever and utterly stupid at the same time.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140607003201/http://earth-info...
> Accuracy where it matters is why
Why the downvotes for correcting this laughable statement? Web Mercator is well documented as being extremely inaccurate.
Hi - I understand you feel strongly; your Web Mercator input is interesting. I would just focus on the intellectually interesting part - people might not get it; you can't control that or compel them to.
You've been repeating essentially the same comment, writing in all caps (in some comments), complaining about downvotes, telling everyone they are idiots one way or another. None of those things are likely to be welcome.