[talk-au] highway shields: AU

[Richard Weait]

Hi All,

I've been working on better highway shield rendering in Canada and the
US for a while. I added a few Australian shields today.

My rendering of shields relies on the network tag as documented

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route#Road_Routes
and
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Custom_Highway_Shields#Australia

To make these work well globally, the network tag should be namespaced
with the country and if needed, the state / province.  I've added the
"AU_" prefix to the Australian shields in the wiki link above.  If you
have a more thorough discussion of the AU network tag please point me
to it.

For now I've implemented a Dirty Hack(r) on my server to allow
rendering for this example below.  The server connection is a bit
fragile, so if you get nothing try again tomorrow.

http://weait.com:8080/map/shield.html?lat=-37.75568&lon=144.92465&zoom=11&layers=BTF

In future, I'll tweak the shield images a bit, but probably not for a
few weeks.

If, in your future highway editing, you could update your network tags
to the AU_NH, AU_NR, etc. form, that will mean that Australian shields
will continue to render after I clean up the Dirty Hack(r). ;-)

I'd like your feedback, including which other shields should be added?
 Metroads?

Best regards and Happy New Year,
Richard