bounds should be required

[mnboos]

If "bounds" is missing, how do I know valid tile-x/y? If the center is also missing, I don't see any possibility to even get valid tile-xy. This problem would be solved by making the "bounds" key required instead of optional.

[mapsam]

Hey @mnboos, thanks for the ticket! I agree that without a bounds or center, it’s difficult to know the valid XY coordinates. My understanding is that bounds and center are useful starting points for rendering and visualizing the map data.

What is your use-case for knowing valid XY tiles? If you know the bounds, that provides you which tiles aren’t valid, but it doesn’t solve the case where tiles inside the bounding box don’t contain data (like a circle inside a square, the corners have no tiles but are within the bounding box). So I guess the question is: is bounds 100% useful for knowing XY? Applications still have to take into account tiles that don’t exist.

[mapsam]

Adding the v3 label since it'll be great to document the important use-cases of bounds and center and clearly define the relationship between maps, tiles, TileJSON.

[andrewharvey]

No bounds could imply worldwide bounds. I think it's common to have no center, in such a case the application can choose.