On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Dermot McNally wrote:

Am I right in thinking that supporting non-rectangular tiles will be the only way to ensure that towns near national or regional borders can know accurately in which country or region they are located?

While it might technically be a good approach now to assign attributes to towns via tiles, such information should actually be contained in the OSM database. I was asking for polygonal tiles because I think its much nicer when administrative boundaries are respected. Nobody really wants to be assigned to a neighboring country by a cartographer. Garmin did a good job in Europe with the national borders, but unfortunately the countries' interiors just have these rectangular patterns. -Wolfgang