Try this: load up the “KML” Sandcastle demo, then flip over to the Bing Maps Roads provider. Now, zoom in on a “facility” that’s in the middle of nowhere – there are a lot of them! – and you’ll see something like this:
Eeesh.
Compare that with the same placemarker on Google Maps (the user-facing service, not loaded via KML, but bear with me):
Of course, choosing the right label style for a given basemap takes time and consideration, but the KMLDataSource does not allow for customization of Placemark labels, it just uses mostly the defaults, with the “fill and outline” style.
I wanted to suggest that part of the problem is with choosing a sensible default for label style. In my experience, dark text with a light outline is more versatile than the reverse, and manages to remain legible on both dark and light backgrounds. Also, the default outline width appears to be 1 – experimentally, it seems like 3 or 4 does a better job of providing contrast when the fill color is too similar to the background. With those changes, you get
Not perfect, but much better. It also works great on a medium background:
It even mostly manages on a black map:
How would the team (and community) feel about making some changes to the defaults? If not for LabelGraphics itself, then at least for the base label settings in KMLDataSource? I think most important would be increasing the outlineWidth (4 seems sensible). It would also be great to either swap fill and outline defaults, or perhaps think about a way to expose a property that can do this conditionally.
