[Tagging] Comparison of tag support: Mapnik, Osmarender, Potlatch, JOSM, Kosmos, Map Features (wiki)

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Ulf Lamping
<ulf.lamping at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Partly because of differences in the intention of the renderers. It
> makes a difference if you want to have a nice map or if you want to aid
> in editing.

Yeah, of course. The hypothetical "SkiOSM" renderer would support
different tags from "CampusOSM" renderer. But there are lots of
differences that can't really be accounted for that way. Why does JOSM
support "proposed=" when the wiki explicitly prohibits it, for
example? :) And lots of other little examples.

Why on earth does Osmarender support sport=curling (when nothing else
does), but not basketball, baseball... Why do all the editors/wiki
propose a huge range of sports, but the renderers essentially ignore
it all?

(I had thought sport=chess would be a joke, but I've already used it
three times just in my suburb!)

> But also because different people are writing the rules. I think most of
> the people working on mapnik, osmarender, Kosmos or JOSM won't often
> work also with other renderers at the same time.

Yeah, and I think there is an unfortunate problem where the
wiki/mappers don't want to tell the renderers what to do, and the
renderers don't want to tell the mappers how to map. There's a lot of
second guessing.

> There is also other stuff, e.g. the widely used piste map things that
> are documented at:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Piste_Maps.

Jeez, there's something seriously wrong in this whole
"proposed/approved" process. People put a lot of work into describing
a feature, but because it's not clear what action it's trying to make
happen, the thing just dies. ("Yes, I vote to make it possible
to...uh...continue to do what I already do.")

It might be better to think in terms of "core" tags and "specialist"
tags or something. If something is core, we expect all decent
renderers to render it. If it's specialist, we document it, but it
doesn't appear on map features, or something.

In all my suddenly non-existent free time, I intend to make a pass
over a lot of these redlinks, adding descriptive entries, at least.
("This tag appears to be used in germany, it's supported by ... etc.")

Steve