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

Ilpo Järvinen ilpo.jarvinen at helsinki.fi
Fri Aug 7 10:20:36 UTC 2015


On Fri, 7 Aug 2015, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:

> > Am 07.08.2015 um 01:15 schrieb Ilpo Järvinen <ilpo.jarvinen at helsinki.fi>:
> > 
> > "unpaved paths" is actually built-up 
> > recretional route whereas the others are just tiny, some even faintly 
> > visible, forest trails.
> 
> there are the tags width, trail visibility and maybe others, that 
> address this problem 

The problem is not that we don't have tags to these. The issue is that 
when all this information is spread to n tags hardly any 
renderer/router/whatever takes advantage of all these "helpful" tags and 
therefore the information won't appear to the end user at all or is 
seriously limited.

> > In theory this prominance problem might be solved 
> > by informal=yes but in practice I expect at least the mapnik stylesheet 
> > guys to stonewall on this because of the extra data column that will be 
> > needed to make them less prominant
> 
> Osm carto is about to activate the hstore extension which will remove 
> the requirement of a column for every key...

Oh, that's nice to hear, finally. :-) :-)

> Informal is not a key about visual prominence but rather a way to 
> distinguish built ways from those that emerge by pure usage

I agree, it's not 100% match. However, I think it still present hierarcy 
that has basis on common sense (remember what you wrote about Japan's road 
hierarcy ;-)) and would be the easiest way to render them with less 
prominance. Arguably it would also  cause some extremely strong informal 
shortcut trail to look less usable than it is based on physical 
appearance but I think it would still be useful compromise (similar 
"misdimensioning" issues occur time to time anyway with car network too 
and we don't make big fuzz about it every time). In theory even that could 
be fixed by looking the other keys too but I doubt that, e.g., default 
mapnik will (or even should try) to make sense out of all sac_scale, 
smoothness, path visibility, etc. tags, it would just get too specific 
and there are just too many tags to create sensible combined styling out 
of all of them.


-- 
 i.


More information about the Tagging mailing list