[Tagging] Reviving the path discussion - the increasing importance of trails in OSM

[Tomas Straupis]

> Very well put! If I understand correctly, to do this without heavy pre-processing,
> the information would have to be in the tags?
> Would it have to be in the tags of every individual way, or would a tag on
> an encompassing area (e.g. landuse=residential) be sufficient?

  Correct. Information would have to be on individual ways, because
say two identical parallel ways close to one another should have to be
reduced to one way.
  Even more: road network pruning is scale dependant, so additional
information could be multiplied by the number of scales required.
  Note: additional information on ways would have to be adjusted even
if the way itself does not change but information in surroundings
change. For example forest path can be placed on a map (in a middle
scale) but later removed after a parallel road is built alongside the
path (say 50m away from the path even without touching/influencing the
path itself).

  Therefore such tagging would go against OSM conventions.