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

[Tal]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Dave Stubbs <osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes. Yes we do.
>
> What we don't do is mis-tag for the renderer. We don't tag
> construction sites as landuse=allotments because we like the colour
> mapnik uses to render allotments. We do however tag things with
> highway=motorway and not highway=omgponies because that's what the
> renderer is expecting and only osmarender will correctly handle
> omgponies as a motorway of arbitraryness.

OK, makes sense.
In multi lingual parts of the map, any use of 'name' tag is
mis-tagging. Any translatable string without language specification is
mis-tagging. The renderer should always follow a prioritized language
list and the map data should be left neutral.
An ultimate solution is currently too complex - you can tell me to set
up a server and render my own map and leave you alone; or the osm site
could show rendered maps in a lot of languages.
This is a temporary hack-ish solution, easy to implement, that will
not harm the data (the "name" tag is anyway going away in the areas
which will have the indirect "name" tags), and provide better data
quality for the reasons I've already specified.


> and you think name=$(name:he) is intuitive to a non-programmer?
> For an intuitive end-user-experience you need to fix the editor
> itself. And when you start playing with the editor you can make the
> copy-paste automatic.

I'm not keen on the $(xx) construct. I only care that I see the actual
name:he rendered on the map.
Fixing the editor is a bad solution, and probably also harder. It will
not assure a better data quality, in the same way that not repeating
the tag twice will. You can never be sure which editor was used, and
you can't force the users to change their editor.