[sp8962]

Well nobody claimed things are going to get simpler.

It is difficult to beat raster tiles in that respect. vector tiles split up responsibility for what you get visually over multiple moving pieces with different provenance and operators.

[lxgr]

> It is difficult to beat raster tiles in that respect.

Intuitively, why can't the local vector rasterizer do whatever the server-side tile rasterizer does, especially if both are fully custom?

[wiredfool]

Partially because they're completely different stacks -- the client side is WebGL + Javascript, and the server side is whatever they've been doing for 15 years.

They're probably missing a raqm/freebidi or something in the stack on the client side.

[maxerickson]

It can, it's just that they typically don't, because they use an off the shelf data schema for the tiles and a library to handle the rendering.

Having the data in tiles also complicates some things (where the renderer needs to consider merged tiles to get a similar result).

[astrange]

For Arabic specifically, different users want text to render differently, so you'd want to do it on the client if you can.

(Some countries use Roman numerals and some use Arabic numerals for numbers. And by Arabic numerals I don't mean 1-9.)

[rafram]

All Arabic-speaking countries use Arabic numerals. Some use Western Arabic numerals (123) and some use Eastern Arabic numerals (١٢٣).

Roman numerals are I, V, X, etc.