Cartopolis

Cartopolis renders current OpenStreetMap data as static maps that replicate the visual style of late-1990s online cartography services. It produces images with jagged roads, plain colors, bitmap labels, and fixed zoom steps that could have been delivered to Netscape Navigator, without directly emulating any original software such as MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps. The project is presented as a modern static website that draws present-day geographic data according to period constraints.

The appearance arises directly from a set of rendering rules rather than post-processing filters. These include integer pixel rounding, absence of antialiasing, use of the 216-color web-safe palette without dithering to create flat fills and hard color banding, aggressive geometry simplification via the Douglas-Peucker algorithm with a tolerance of roughly one on-screen pixel at every zoom level, and painting dark road casings before bright fills. The name itself adopts the naming conventions of the era, positioned conceptually between services such as eAtlas and CyberMaps.

A live instance displays the whole of Switzerland as static files. Maps generated by the tool can be exported as GIF89a files using the classic web-safe palette. The site is hosted at seriot.ch/cartopolis and forms part of a larger collection of drawing projects by Nicolas Seriot.