[Tagging] Fast food vs. restaurant vs. cafe

[Roy Wallace]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>
> The entire reason such tagging is useful (vs. amenity=food) is that
> people can ask "find me a nearby cafe".  When I ask that, I want a
> coffee shop that serves sandwiches, or a sandwich shop that serves
> coffee, or something like that -- that I'm likely to be glad I went to.
> I definitely don't want McDonald's

If I asked "find me a nearby cafe", a McCafe would be fine with me!

> One of the key distinctions in practice
> is that mega-corpooration heavily-advertised pseudofood is "fast food",
> and independent coffee shops are "cafe".  At least that's how everyone I
> know sees it.

Unfortunately, you don't "know" "everyone". The Coffee Club, for
example, is certainly not independent, but I'd call it a cafe.

> You can call this bias and subjectivity, but I call it communication
> based on a shared vocabulary.

I call it bias and subjectivity. It's only a shared vocabulary if the
vocabulary is shared.

It's one thing to define "amenity=cafe" in a certain way that may be
counter-intuitive to some (that's fine! put it on the wiki! I'll look
up the definition!), but it's madness to not bother defining it at
all.