[OSM-dev] no page=? argument for searching by tag

[Dave Stubbs]

On 23/11/2007, Marcus Wolschon <marcus at wolschon.biz> wrote:
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> Hello everyone,
>
> I noticed that
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Protocol_Version_0.5#Searching_for_Objects_by_Tag
> does not allow a page-attribute like the other queries.
> How hard would it be to add that?
>
> This renders this call useless for
> * fetching the motorway-network or
> * fetching all country-borders.
>
> I think this would be a good and simple addition and make
> the protcoll more consistent. What does everyone else think?
>

I think we have to ask what the main API is for?
It's currently optimised for the purposes of editing the data... you
download for an area, you query specific nodes/ways etc and you upload
revisions of those. You can also access the history of objects, but
not in a very easy way at present.

It's not great for rendering (doesn't return polygons which completely
surround the bbox for instance), and it's not great for tag based
querying. Adding these features may seriously compromise the speed of
the system, and in some cases make editing harder.

If it's OK to have data which may be a couple of days old (from what
you're trying to do I'd say it probably was OK) then you might want to
take a look at Osmxapi. I think it's probably much better suited to
the type of thing you're trying to do.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Osmxapi