[OSM-newbies] Highway=stile vs Barrier=stile

[Mike Harris]

Having started this thread, perhaps I should just add a further thought:

Whether or not tags in general should be deprecated (and btw, this bit of jargon is spreading through cyberspace - 'discontinued' is almost the same and a bit clearer for non-native English speakers?), I have s ort of feeling that it is a bit early to have added highway=stile to the deprecated features list. Perhaps this step should not have been taken until the major renderers (such as osmarender) had caught up with the newer barrier=stile? And until a robot had changed the very large number of existing highway=stile tags to barrier=stile?

For the moment I am inclined to use both tags to get the best of both worlds!

Mike Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Stubbs [mailto:osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk] 
Sent: 11 January 2009 16:16
To: newbies at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-newbies] Highway=stile vs Barrier=stile

2009/1/11 Skratz_b <Skratz_b at yahoo.com>:
> Dave Stubbs wrote:
>> 2009/1/2 xeen <aka.xeen at gmail.com>:
>>> Never tag for the renders.
>>
>>
>> Feel free to tag for the renderers.
>>
>> When people talk about not tagging for the renderers, what they 
>> generally mean is don't mis-tag just to get something rendered.
>
> no, they don't.
>


True, but they should. Anything else is just meaningless.


>> This is not the case here: highway=stile is a completely legitimate 
>> way of tagging a stile.
>
> no, it isn't, its deprecated.
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deprecated_features
>
> The term deprecation is applied to features that are superseded and 
> should be avoided.


That's only if you agree tags can be deprecated. I don't. Neither do many other people in the project. Deprecation implies and requires many things which we don't have, such as a controlled versioning system to phase them out, and most importantly, tags which were precated in the first place.

Deprecation means nothing, and is simply a word that someone on the wiki has decided to use after some other people on the wiki decided to use a different tag name.

highway=stile is still a completely legitimate way of tagging a stile.

Google the mailing lists for the many conversations that have been had on this issue.

Dave