In the web UI, OSM can’t be zoomed in far enough to see the names of POIs in reasonably dense areas. I can get around this by going into edit mode, and mobile apps don’t have this restriction. But the out-of-the-box experience, for non-insiders just using the web site, doesn’t reveal all that OSM has to offer.
Does anyone know what the rationale for this is?
The website relies on something called tiles to display the map, which are prerendered blocks at different zoom levels.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles
In order to make any kind of devices able to visualize the map, the tile server will distribute rasterized tiles, which are easy to process even on a low-powered device. The drawback is that those tiles need to be generated by the server and more importantly stored. A tile of the entire earth zoomed out will not take a lot of storage, but the higher you zoom, the more tiles you need. If you don’t put a higher limit to the zoom level ,it will take an exponential amount of storage on the server, which is a problem.
since CyclOSM, traffic and humanitarian Style can zoom to 20… do you know why exactly the Standard Map does limit to 19?