[Potlatch-dev] "Source" key and map_features.xml

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 11:32 PM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> The first thing I changed was the "priority" field from "highest" to
> "lowest". The field is used for ordering the Editors (widgets) when
> there's more than one on a Tab, and within each priority they are
> ordered alphabetically. It looked strange to me to see things like...

Ah - I misinterpreted priority. I had thought it was a way to decide
which fields would be shown in the Basic tab in the case of
overcrowding.

> ...in that order, simply aesthetically speaking I would expect the
> source metadata to come at the bottom of the list of attributes,

Agreed.

> rather than interspersed. (There's also a slightly more context-free
> reasoning, in that given a binary choice between a) any given
> attribute or b) the source tag being filled out, I'd prefer OSM to
> have the attribute!).

I can't decide if I accept your premise ("given a binary choice"), but
I agree with your logic.

> Secondly is the presence, being one of "always" "onTagMatch" or
> "withCategory" - I moved it from always to onTagMatch. It would be
> easy for us to mark everything as "always" and thereby remove the need
> for the different tabs, but I quite like having them.

Yep. (Aside: I recently redesigned my organisation's website. Every
single person thought there should be a direct link from somewhere on
the front page menu to the page about their particular area of work.)

> So I think
> there's a high bar needs reaching for the "always" presence and source
> IMHO doesn't meet that.

Source is kind of a meta-attribute. I work with metadata harvesting in
my day job, and you'll often see the source of data wedged in
everywhere. Even if it's small, italic, grey, whatever, it's really
handy to be able to see.

(But in the absence of a nifty GUI solution, fine.)

> I think withCategory is the most interesting
> one (and, from UI point of view, gives the least-confusing result of
> being consistent between objects) but it's rarely used at the moment.
> I'd like to see more use of the withCategory tag.

Hadn't noticed it.


> Finally, on the "rules of etiquette" question, bringing it up on the
> MLs is absolutely the best thing to do -
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_Code_of_Conduct_%28Draft%29#Be_Collaborative

Ta. Sorry to waste so many words on such a trivial change, but it's
actually very helpful for me (and hopefully others) to hear you and
Richard articulate your visions, general approaches, goals, unstated
assumptions, etc.

When I get a chance to get my thoughts together, I'd like to start a
discussion about the current categories in map_features.xml.
"Buildings" is particularly broken - only about two of the things in
it are necessarily building=yes. But I digress...

Steve