[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Sidewalks as separate ways

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Fri Mar 25 12:38:18 GMT 2011


David Paleino wrote:
> No, it's up to YOU, as a developer, to support basic OSM things.
> "Relations" are an OSM primitive, and to be considered the official 
> editor, since you're being hosted on osm.org, you MUST implement them.
> That's IMHO, obviously.

It's IYHO but your O would be better if it were qualified by some facts. :)

Let me repeat as you appear unwilling either to actually read my previous
posting or to click 'Edit' and spend ten seconds finding out for yourself:

Potlatch 2 _already_ has excellent relation support.

However:

> My proposal doesn't use anything special to be implemented in editors.

That's not the point.

Anyone can map anything in Potlatch, or JOSM, or Merkaartor, or their own
favourite editor, by creating the primitives manually, and adding tags,
using the standard UI. Of course they can.

Yet this isn't always a sufficiently user-friendly way of creating them.
Sometimes, a special-purpose editor can make it more understandable for
newcomers, and quicker for experienced users. For example, both JOSM and
Potlatch have dedicated turn-restriction editors, which are much more
user-friendly than manually creating the relations and entering the members
in the appropriate roles.

_That_ is the challenge. If we want people to map pavements (or sidewalks as
those crazy Yanks call them ;) ) then it isn't good enough just to say "hey,
do it all manually". We have to think about an inviting UI for it. We want
the newcomers to be involved - not to make OSM into more and more of a
ghetto for people with l337 Linux or GIS sk1llz.

If you've thought about it, that's great. If you have suggestions for how it
might be implemented, that's great. But saying "I don't use Potlatch, so I
can't tell how advanced his support for relations is" reads, to me, as
"screw you, Potlatch guys, I expect you to do all the hard work in making it
easy for users". We simply don't have infinite resources to do this with
every single suggestion. Making OSM easy to edit is not the sole
responsibility of three people on the potlatch-dev mailing list, it's
_everyone_'s responsibility.

Richard



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