[Tagging] highway=footway - Advanced definition: Distinction footway vs path

[John Willis]

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 6, 2015, at 5:28 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> is it a "highway"? Tags are not always 1:1 representations of (all) the meaning(s) of the words in natural language.

When we have footway, cycleway, bridleway, steps, track, and via_ferrata, again, why is path the odd man out? 

Why does path get to stretch so far above its name and useful range? 

Its like naming it highway=not_car_way, and throwing the rest of the definition in after, however one interprets the myriad of subtags that could be added to it. Something that could represent a mountain path, a mountain track, a gravel bridleway, a concrete cycleway, and a asphalt walkway through a park is a useless garbage tag. Literally pointless - as it can mean anything anyone wants it to be. Im not trying to be offensive - I just cant understand why a wide-open tag would ever be considered, let alone approved, when assumed grade is _so important_ for walking and cycling, similar to trunk, primary, secondary, etc for driving. It os a relative scale by country, but i

So far in the replies, Ive read a sidewalk isn't a footway (its lanes on a road [no]) and a track in a wilderness park isn't a track (its a path [uhh, no]) 

Not being able to define sidewalks separately nor separate tracks from trails means all of the mapping is untrustworthy for proper routing nor proper rendering ***to represent the world as it exists***

I must be completely disconnected from consensus then, because the more I understand =path as defined sounds seriously weird and the replies about what is and isn't a path sound even more bizarre. 

Javbw.