Important todos

[imagico]

With over 500 open issues it is fairly difficult for contributors to identify issues with high importance to work on. We have the good first issue label to indicate low hanging fruits suitable also for less experienced developers. But we don't have any good starting point to find the most important tasks.

This is not meant as a list for newcomers, it is mostly about strategic issues that need substantial work but that are significant to make progress on other things and to really move the style forward.

• the move to the flex backend, Use flex backend #4431, mostly needs discussion and consensus building on if or not to have the separate transport tables, a few smaller issues with the admin boundary rendering need addressing but fixes for those have already been suggested.
• consistent poi symbol and label prioritization, Symbol and label prioritization is not in sync with the starting zoom levels #3880, requires working on a consensus how to approach this and likely substantial development work to implement. Depending on the approach chosen the AC-Style might provide some useful ground work - see Symbol and label prioritization is not in sync with the starting zoom levels #3880 (comment)
• disentangling the use of blue and purple color in the style, currently blue colors are used very non-systematically for various often unrelated features (transport symbols - Consider unifying transport with air-transport and separating accommodation #3631, several different kinds of water related symbols, cycleways, water lines and polygons). And the use of purple for admin boundaries (Admin boundaries color is too prominent and conflicts with other potential uses #3489) is constraining us quite massively in improving consistency of our color scheme. Requires working on consensus. Solving this would facilitate addressing a large number of issues, in particular
  • Render man_made=water_well #1224
  • path/footway rendering bad to read at z=13/14 #1748
  • Water should be better recognizable - difference to forest color too low #1781
  • footway line styles difficult to distinguish and in general much weaker than cycleway #1793
  • fountain rendering problems #1934
  • Remake natural=spring as dot+icon #3461
  • Simplify low-zoom landcover rendering to 4 main colors (requires 3 water colors) #3670
  • Rivers and canal lines and areas should be darker than other water areas #3896
  • Render ocean and seas differently than fresh water #3895
• developing a data preprocessing strategy, needed in particular for getting rid of the remaining non-OSM data - see Replace usage of Natural Earth boundaries data #2172, requires working on a consensus how to approach this.
• developing a strategy on rendering of explicit and implicit road access restrictions, Render more specific access tags i.e. bicycle, motor_vehicle etc #214, requires working on a consensus how to approach this - depending on the outcome of this could mean major cartographic redesign of the roads rendering, in particular needed for consistently depicting road mapping differentiated by means of transport (like cycling roads, bus only roads etc.)

Much of this has consensus building as the main first prerequisite. See also #3951.