[Tagging] natural=bay as nodes are evil

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 26 October 2014, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> Please, try mapping bays as areas - not as nodes.
>
> It is really rare to see it done this way - but it is doable, see
> http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/5CQ

Doable for sure but an awfully bad idea, mapping bays as areas would 
mean two features for the same object (coastline polygon and bay area).  
Furthermore the outer edge of a bay, i.e. the edge that is not 
coastline is usually not well defined and would require an arbitrary 
cutoff.

Maintaining bay polygons would be an awful mess, they would end up 
frequently being broken.  And there is no gain at all in terms of 
substantial information in the database compared to nodes (since the 
coastline is already mapped and the non-coastline edge is arbitrary).

The reason you would prefer areas is probably simply that this would 
make it easier for to use in rendering - but making life more difficult 
for the mapper just to make it easier for the renderer is not a good 
idea.  Based on the coastlines and the bay nodes you can quite easily 
generate approximate bay polygons that can be used for the purpose of 
labeling for example (yes, even for the Paulsdorfer Bucht).

This argument by the way was already made in a slightly different 
context in

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/804

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/