[Tagging] units and notations for maxstay

[Colin Smale]

On 2019-02-20 13:29, Paul Allen wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 at 12:08, marc marc <marc_marc_irc at hotmail.com> wrote: 
> 
>> Le 20.02.19 à 12:39, Colin Smale a écrit :
>>> "T2H" could be enough. What's the minimum IQ required to understand 
>>> "T2H", "T30M" or "5D"?
>> 
>> ask other mapper how to tag "2 hours" in the iso form.
>> I doubt that 1% 'll reply "T2H" without first reading the doc.
>> it not only the IQ, it's also the use of user-not-friendly value.
> 
> You might get some mappers prepared to use the ISO format.  Good luck with ordinary 
> consumers using the query tool of standard carto: the results of that are intimidating 
> enough without requiring them to read an ISO document to interpret the results. 
> 
> One day we're going to have to decide whether OSM is about masturbation or sex.  Either 
> we're doing this for ourselves alone or we're trying to produce something that will be 
> appreciated and used by non-mappers.  If we're masturbating then T2H30M is fine.  If 
> we're trying to have sex then 2.5 hours is the way to go.

Even in this case, we should take the trouble to define the syntax for a
duration, in such a way that the definition is reusable and extensible.
Should it be 2.5 hours, or should it be 2 hours 30 minutes? Using only
fractional hours will be problematic to encode 17 minutes, for example;
and unwieldy to encode 6 months. Lets be clear, the storage format can
(and should) be decoupled from the display format. What is stored in the
database can easily (assuming it is sufficiently standardised!!!) be
translated for human consumption, and the inverse can be done when
storing. It happens in just about every computer program ever. Storing
the value as an ISO string assures machine-readability and editors,
browsers etc can use standard libraries to format it for humans, in
whatever language you like. 

Among the advantages of using the ISO standard include that all that
thinking has already been done, and the documentation of the syntax is
available freely in millions of languages.
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