[Tagging] Proposal: Sunset ref=* on ways in favor of relations

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 08/11/2015, Dave Swarthout <daveswarthout at gmail.com> wrote:
> In that section the author, sk53, says, "Creating a whole set of boundaries
> encompassing one country and part of another is not a light undertaking on
> OSM. It is fiddly work, and involves manipulating objects with many
> dependencies. In practice I find it somewhat reminiscent of software
> migration projects: mainly mundane but you need to keep your wits about
> you.
>
> Contrary to what some believe, none of the OSM editors can prevent damage
> to other objects in this process. Mapping boundaries on this scale
> inevitably involves relations, and relations are not semantically clean
> objects at the level of the OSM data model."

While I agree that relations can break and can be tricky to edit, I
find it tiring to see this argument repeatedly used against the use of
relations for this or that usecase.

The stuff we map is becoming more complex and, in increasingly many
cases, relations are the best available tool for the job. Why complain
about the difficulty of editin boundary,multipolygons,or routes
relations when maping the same features without relations would be
even worse ?

There are some grey areas: when do I switch from a shared-nodes closed
way to a multipolygon (or from ref tag on ways to a relation), but
we're lucky enough to have options. Let each maper decide wich
technique makes the best use of his (an furture contributors's) time.

Sure, It'd be great to have proper Area (and maybe even Multiline)
elements in the OSM data model to replace hacky uses of the Relation
element. Or even "just" have the API check uploaded relations for
geometrical correctness. But don't wait for that to start using
relations.