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

[Dave Stubbs]

2009/3/11 Tal <tal.bav at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>

So fix the editors instead.
There's one option been pointed out already: use a separate tag to
tell you what language the default "name" tag is. The editor can
happily write the name to both name and name:* tags, write a language
to some other tag, and provide validation that everything is working
as expected.

The fact that macros/redirects will confuse large numbers of people,
and introduce a stage of complication and parsing into a previously
raw tag which none of the existing tools will be expecting seem like
good reasons not to continue.

Oh and I'll update my threat from the no-names thread of ages ago: if
you start doing this I'll make it my life's work to get on the local
council to name as many features as possible as "$(name:fr)" with an
explicitly stated french translation as "$(name:en)".

Dave