page_title: Tiled web map
hierarchical_section_title: Tiled web map
caption_attribution_description: English: An exaggeration of a tiled web map, in this case the default OpenStreetMap style near Melbourne, Australia.
context_page_description: A tiled web map, slippy map or tile map is a map displayed in a browser by seamlessly joining dozens of individually requested image or vector data files over the Internet. It is the most popular way to display and navigate maps, replacing other methods such as WMS which typically display a single large image, with arrow buttons to navigate to nearby areas. Google Maps was one of the first major mapping sites to use this technique. The first tiled web maps used raster tiles, before the emergence of vector tiles.
  There are several advantages to tiled maps. Each time the user pans, most of the tiles are still relevant, and can be kept displayed, while new tiles are fetched. This greatly improves the user experience, compared to fetching a single map image for the whole viewport. It also allows individual tiles to be pre-computed, a task easy to parallelize. Also, displaying rendered images served from a web server is less computationally demanding than rendering images in the browser, a benefit over technologies such as WFS. While many map tiles are in raster format, the number of suppliers of vector tiles is growing.
context_section_description: A tiled web map, slippy map (in OpenStreetMap terminology) or tile map (raster or vector) is a map displayed in a browser by seamlessly joining dozens of individually requested image or vector data files over the Internet. It is the most popular way to display and navigate maps, replacing other methods such as WMS which typically display a single large image, with arrow buttons to navigate to nearby areas. Google Maps was one of the first major mapping sites to use this technique. The first tiled web maps used raster (image) tiles, before the emergence of vector tiles.
  There are several advantages to tiled maps. Each time the user pans, most of the tiles are still relevant, and can be kept displayed, while new tiles are fetched. This greatly improves the user experience, compared to fetching a single map image for the whole viewport. It also allows individual tiles to be pre-computed, a task easy to parallelize. Also, displaying rendered images served from a web server is less computationally demanding than rendering images in the browser, a benefit over technologies such as WFS. While many map tiles are in raster format (a bitmap file such as PNG or JPG), the number of suppliers of vector tiles is growing. The advantage of vector tiles is that each client (browser) can apply a custom style to the map. In such a case the actual map tile pixels are rendered by the browser. An advantage of vector tiles is that the client can decide to rotate the map without all text labels becoming unreadable, as the labels don't rotate.
caption: An exaggeration of a tiled web map, in this case the default OpenStreetMap style near Melbourne, Australia. Tiled web maps are normally displayed with no gap between tiles.
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