[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Enhancing natural=peak tag
Christoph Hormann
chris_hormann at gmx.de
Wed Jul 9 11:39:08 UTC 2014
On Wednesday 09 July 2014, Daniel Koć wrote:
> [...] It's just my beginnings there, so
> I'll wait some time before saying anything conclusive, but for now
> I'm very surprised how the low hanging fruit can be not picked for so
> long without anybody noticing it, even if all the code is already
> waiting to be merged (
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/705 ).
I can very much relate to that but this is not a matter that can be
resolved easily. Everyone has things he/she likes to change in the
standard map style but good map design is something that very much
needs good coordination for an harmonic overall appearance. This is
difficult in an open community approach.
My opinion is that the best approach would be to establish better means
for people to create variants of the style and present them to a broad
audicence. This would have two effects - first it would allow changes
to be tested more thoroughly making actual merging of changes into the
main style less risky to break things and second it would help making
the whole process more democratic since a change that is good and
popular and already available to the community will put pressure on the
style maintainers to integrate it.
Of course such a scenario would require quite significant ressources to
implement, it would be a very worthy project for anyone looking for a
specific area to support OSM monetarily.
Currently the main alternatives to the standard style are the region
specific versions created by some local communities (like french and
german). Those however are quite specific in aim and are too different
from the main style for things to easily be contributed back into the
standard style. Also these styles themselves are not really in open
development.
> For me it tells us clearly that at least we should track such things
> better. If we made just a simple wiki table named "Accepted
> propositions - rendering state" with current comments from rendering
> team ("done", "todo - from when", "wontfix - reasons", "undecided -
> problems to be solved"), it could help us connecting loose ends a
> lot! I can even do it myself, but I need to know it would be used at
> all. I don't know yet how big is the gap between default tagging and
> default rendering.
In general a good tagging scheme should stand alone and not be designed
specifically for a certain rendering. To this aim it is quite good not
to have a too close connection between tagging and rendering. A tag
that contains useful and specific information can also be useful in
rendering even if the actual way it is rendered is not considered
during tag design.
> [...] I would rather include all such icons
> in general, because there was a reason somebody wrote it, a community
> consensus was established and it immediately promotes using such
> quality-approved tags. If we want to avoid the clutter (which is a
> noble aim in itself), don't try to avoid it altogether, but rather
> set the reasonable zoom threshold.
<sigh>
Fixed zoom threshold are one of the major problems of the current map
style, they are selected to look fine for a certain area, usually the
favorite city of the one making the style decision. Choose a different
area where the map scale is different or the geographic setting leads
to a different distribution of POIs and things fall apart quickly.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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