[OSM-dev] osmarender patch - Better support for non-english/multi-lang areas

[Tal]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This will result in the very commonly used name=* tag becoming useless
> for anyone that doesn't support this ad-hoc macro language once this
> starts being entered into the database.

It will only be useless for parts of the world that care about
multiple languages. I tag in two languages, and the only reason I
bother to use the "name" tag, is that I depend upon the slippy map on
the osm site that uses that tag. If/when we had a local site, i'm
pretty sure we'd not be using the "name" tag, and your tools would
still need to be changed to properly use names in that area.
Besides, even now it is somewhat useless, because you don't know what
language you're getting. I tag name and name:he with the same value.
Previously, and even today, people tag "name" as name:en, or
transcription of name:he with Latin letters, or even - both Hebrew and
English in the same "name" tag.
A simple preprocessor before the tools could always change the data to
the way they need it. But the regular mappers are better off working
with that data model, and seeing it rendered in order to continue
mapping and fix errors.


> Can we please not introduce the disaster of templates into the OSM
> database, if you want to automatically keep two tags in sync it would
> be better to do that in your OSM editor.

That is a lot of manual work that could be done by a computer.
Especially when fixing spelling errors or modifying names. This
happens a lot as we've not settled on a naming convention yet...