On the OpenStreetMap blog, an announcement that vector tiles will be coming to OSM later this year. This is a significant, if belated technical change: other map platforms moved to vector mapping years ago (Google announced the change in 2013). But there are reasons for the delay:

Vector tiles have become industry standard in interactive maps that, unlike openstreetmap.org, don’t get updated often, and where you can simply recalculate your whole database occasionally.

But the map displayed on openstreetmap.org are quite uniquely different! They get updated incrementally and constantly, a minute after you edit; it’s a critical part of the feedback loop to mappers—and how the author of this blog post got hooked in the first place. This is why we have to invest in our own vector tile software stack.

The switch to vector tiles, the post goes on to say, will enable all sorts of dynamic changes to the map: “3d maps, more efficient data mixing and matching and integration of other datasets, thematic styles, multilingual maps, different views for administrative boundaries, interactive points of interest, more accessible maps for vision-impaired users, and I’m sure many other ideas that no one has come up with yet.”