If nothing else, a trivial thing I hadn't considered: tides. Coastlines aren't a constant feature even on a day timescale. OpenStreetMap standardizes on the coastline feature being "mean high water springs", the high tide line in spring averaged over the past 19 years.
There's a dedicated path in the OSM rendering pipeline just for producing the coastline+ocean backdrops, completely separate from the entire rest of the mapping logic, because it's just its own cursed little problem.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread | More toots from danderson@hachyderm.io
text/geminiThis content has been proxied by September (3851b).