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Life & fun · July 22, 2026

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Cartopolis – OpenStreetMap rendered like it's 1999

Cartopolis – OpenStreetMap rendered like it's 1999 launched on July 22, 2026 with 13 votes, #1,232 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.

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In plain words

Cartopolis renders OpenStreetMap data with a visual style inspired by 1990s web design and cartography. It's for people interested in maps, web nostalgia, or alternative map visualizations. The project takes freely available map data and presents it through an aesthetic lens that evokes early internet cartography, offering a distinctive take on how geographic information can be displayed and experienced.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the late 1990s, online cartography services such as MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps provided maps as small, static GIF files. You clicked an arrow, waited, and a new pane appeared: jagged roads, plain colors, bitmap labels, and fixed zoom steps. Cartopolis brings that visual language to present-day OpenStreetMap data, without emulating MapQuest or any other original software. It is a modern static website that draws today's maps as they could have been served to Netscape Navigator. Even the name is period dressing: Cartopolis could have been an actual mapping service of the era, somewhere between eAtlas and CyberMaps. The result can be exported as a GIF89a using the classic 216-color web-safe…from seriot.ch

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