With a human face
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Dln't quote me on this, but from what I've heard, the Mercador projection became standard because it's good for navigating since qit conserves angles. Draw a strait line depicting your current trajectory and another the trajectory that would get you where you want, measure the angle between them, and that's the actual angle you need to turn.
In the Internet age, I believe Mercator remains standard because it's easy, since image buffers and UI viewports are implemented as rectangular arrays. For example, when you click on the map the pixel coordinates can be converted to (lat, long) just by scaling, without having to do complicated coordinate transformations.
And no projection is perfect they all introduce weird things, like this equirectangular map
which is not conformal or equal area.
This one has been mentioned a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection