[OSM-dev] Please readd "OSM" as export format

[Frederik Ramm]

John,

On 10.08.2013 02:37, Jason Remillard wrote:
> Just one thought. The scale issue is not going to be part of our users
> mental model

[...]

>    - Just always do extracts from one of the mirror servers that have
> the capacity to do really large extracts, to reduce the probability
> that users need to under stand this edge case.

I think that those users who have no mental model about what to expect 
would be very likely to request arbitrarily large bounding boxes and 
then come complainig about how it was impossible to load the data in 
JOSM, or ArcGIS editor, or whatever.

When drawing a bbox on the map for exporting, they might very well 
assume that what they get in OSM format will be what they (currently) 
see, and not the 5 GB of houses that were not visible at the current 
zoom level.

This is not an argument for or against anything discussed in this 
thread; just something to keep in mind. Yes, giving the user what they 
want is user friendly, but no, someone who says "export this bbox in OSM 
format" does often not really want that. The principle of least surprise 
would probably require something like

[Export as OSM PBF format (4.5 GB)]

but of course we currently lack the technology to make a good guess 
about the file size.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"