[Tagging] Deprecated features - highway=disused

[Craig Wallace]

On 21/12/2010 20:17, Wyo wrote:
> Craig Wallace wrote:
>> I think using disused=yes is a very bad idea.
>> It will break all of the existing renderers/applications that don't know
>
> Here is a sample of a disused canal which doesn't break at all. I don't think it
> would break with highways. If you use highway=disused you loose the information
> what highway it was. E.g. a motorway or a path?
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.79577&lon=7.40601&zoom=16&layers=M

There is a rule in the Mapnik stylesheet specifically for 
waterway=canal, disused=yes.
There is no such rules for highways or anything else. So for example 
something tagged as highway=motorway, disused=yes will still be rendered 
as a normal motorway. Which means it does break things.

Yes, the Mapnik stylesheet could be changed to handle this for all 
highway types, and all amenities, and all shops etc. But it would make 
the stylesheets much more complicated.
This has been an open bug for over 2 years: 
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1085

And then there are hundreds of other applications using OSM data, which 
would all need to be modified to fix this.

Also, I suggested tagging disused things as something like 
highway:disused=motorway, then you don't lose information on what type 
of highway it was.

Craig