STstevage·Sep 4, 2025
>What does this mean?
Ugh, dumb typo - it was late. I meant "Obviously they'd never use GeoJSON in that use case".
> Higher in this post I see a reference to "GeoJSON vector tiles" and I'm curious what that means.
It's what it sounds like: vector tiles, but instead of protobuf, the data is simply passed directly as GeoJSON. Really convenient for a use case like a server that generates data on demand: easy to generate (ie, it avoids all the difficulty of OP's post), easy to inspect in the browser for debugging. Only downside is it's less efficient space-wise than protobuf. So it's useful as a first step for a proof of concept (to be replaced by MVT), or in a case where the size doesn't matter.
>Once you've done that, you might as well cram it into a protobuf or other highly efficient container.
I'm disputing the "you might as well" bit for
Read the rest
many use cases. :) (Again, I think Mapbox is very geared towards large scale uses, but a lot of the internet is small and bespoke).
It was actually Tangram, not OpenLayers, that I was thinking of that supports it: https://github.com/tangrams/tangram?tab=readme-ov-file#vecto...
>MVT is a technology built on and for S3-like services.
It's interesting that you say that. My experience, having been down this road a few times, is that serving MVT from S3 is generally a pain that I don't recommend for new clients. It takes some pretty specific AWS configuration, and the process of uploading thousands of individual files is slow and error-prone. (I wrote a guide on it once but can't find it now).
Yeah it's a good solution for large-scale uses (again...) but not good for the average user.
PMTiles seems like a pretty compelling alternative for those scenarios: ship one file instead of thousands, and rely on HTTP range requests. The downside I ran into is that not all "S3-like services" support that.
In practice, I recommend either hosting data on Mapbox/MapTiler/whoever is cheapest this month if the volumes are low, or setting up a tiny tile server. Even a tiny server is sufficient for serving tiles, and costs a fraction of what Mapbox charges (especially since Mapbox's change to charging per square kilometre, which is absolutely cost prohibitive for sparse data).
>we continue to research additional optimizations for VT,
Can you elaborate? The spec (https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec) has not had an update in 4 years, and since MVT v2 did not include any substantive changes, the spec is essentially unchanged since 2014. In 2018, a working group for a version 3 was announced (https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec/issues/103) but then apparently quietly abandoned only a couple of months later.