[josm-dev] Common presets for OSM editors?

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Thu Jun 25 13:39:39 UTC 2015


Sorry for jumping in late and likely breaking the threading.

But given that I'm likely one of the largest users of the JOSM format
presets outside of the JOSM devs and maintain my own fork of the default
JOSM preset ( https://github.com/simonpoole/beautified-JOSM-preset ) I
do have a couple of comments.

In general while I think that some coordination and reduction of
parallel efforts is good,  at least in the three cases at hand: JOSM, iD
and vespucci the presets form an important part of the UI and it will be
very difficult to have a "one preset fits all" solution that will really
be satisfactory (I'm referring to the contents here).

While both formats (iD and JOSM) have their strengths and weaknesses it
is fairly clear that the JOSM presets contain a lot more information and
are likely functionally a superset of the iD format. In any case if
functionality is missing I suspect it should be no issue to add it.

But, as I said above, I'm not convinced, even if iD would start using
JOSM presets (naturally in a JSON or yaml format, because it wouldn't do
to use XML :-)), I don't think that you would end up using the same
contents. Except if somebody produces a fairly sophisticated system to
generate "preset collections" from individual presets which in itself
would be a lot of work (you would need to track preset references etc).

But there is one area were some coordination should be far easier and
give some immediate gains: using the same natural language term for the
same OSM object. Just so that it is clear, I'm not referring to key and
tag values here, which IMHO are not far away from simply being random
values that we attach a meaning by how we use them, not what the actual
words mean.

The above would be a gain both in the original English and translations.
Having this would make it far easier to switch between editors and
hopefully we could avoid literal translation of keys and values that I
have seen now and then with iD, which doesn't make any sense at all.

Simon

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