[Tagging] Basic cartography features missing, why?

[Anders Torger]

Probably the database should be organized in layers. The more 
information there is, the messier it becomes to have everything visible 
at once. With JOSM you can sort of simulate layers with filters on tags 
(I use that feature all the time), so I'm not sure if it actually needs 
to be layers in the database or if it just needs to be adaptation on the 
tools side.

I disagree that names in the landscape is of little value, and actually 
defining what it is covering is providing additional value over just 
placing a point, and I think is opposite to tag for the renderer.

And in the end it's about the resulting map. The current use of points 
won't do what's required to be able to make good cartography.

/Anders

On 2020-11-07 13:01, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 11/6/20 19:31, Anders Torger wrote:
>> ** Tagging bays and straits as areas work great, as the renderer gets
>> and idea how prominent it is and it can make proper text sizing and 
>> they
>> can be seen even if zoomed out if the area is large. Lots of our 
>> lakes,
>> even quite small ones have sub-naming, and with these features I can
>> make really good mapping of this.
> 
> This is an absolute pain for me. We're seeing people define
> ultra-precise multipolygons of various sizes with the single purpose of
> getting a name rendered somewhere in a bay.
> 
> If this infects other areas of cartography, we'll see people build
> thousand-node polygons for vaguely defined land areas ("the XY
> lowlands", "the XY mountain range", "the XY plateau"). This is a very
> sad development that makes editing more complicated and burdens the
> database with information of very little value.
> 
> What people want to achieve is some lettering on the map, and because
> the only way to get that is making huge polygons that purport do
> describe the exact extent of something, that's what they do.
> 
> I think this needs to be stopped. We've created a
> mapping-for-the-renderer mechanism by the back door. This is actually
> *worse* than if we were to allow people to place a point somewhere and
> annotate it with a desired label font size and orientation. Not that I
> would advocate the latter, but what we have now has all the negative
> features of the latter *plus* the side effect of creating giant,
> unmaintainable polygons.
> 
> Bye
> Frederik