Ditch TopoJSON support?

[mourner]

@mourner: I also had some thoughts about whether I made a mistake by pushing TopoJSON support instead of keeping things simple and limited to GeoJSON
The size compression benefits are good but it makes the format significantly more complex, this will harm adoption rate
well, not very complex currently, but it'll be much more complex when we make it streamable
@tmcw: hm, i think yes, we should dump it.
i'm divided on topojson because of the dual purpose of topology in it
like, a really good open source implementation of a topology-supporting geometry system... super useful
but topojson is mainly doing it to save bytes

[brendan-ward]

@mourner What about a separate implementation for topojson instead? Seems like both benefit from the building blocks established here, but both geometry systems don't need to realized in the same container... Could be a separate project in a separate repo if needed for better isolation.

Would having separate implementations help reduce the complexity of each to a tolerable level? Or put differently, is the aggregate complexity of doing both here in the same container higher than the sum of the complexities of doing each individually?

[mourner]

Separate repo may be a good option, since the two repos could be developed at a different pace then, while we could focus on perfecting an awesome + simple GeoJSON compression that has higher chances of adoption.

[mourner]

Removed and feeling pretty good about it — makes iterating on the spec so much easier, and simpler is pretty much always better. Topobuf would be a good name for a project this branches out into. I also think that sum of complexities of two different projects will be lower than trying to squash two pretty different formats into one spec.

[ramsestom]

So is anyone currently developping a "Topobuf" project? It looks like no one is maintaining a .proto file for topojson since it has been ditched here, which is sad.

[maurizi]

@ramsestom I needed it myself for a project, so I've forked the 1.0 version of this library with geojson support removed.

It's on npm as topobuf and hosted on Github https://github.com/azavea/topobuf/