[Talk-GB] [OSM-talk] "Unsurfaced road" and "Byway"?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi Ulf,

> Interestingly, you took approved tags that were approved less than a 
> month or so - do you think a freshly approved tag will appear a thousand 
> times a day after it was appoved?

I think he does. Many people don't view the "approval" process as a
*prerequisite* to a tag being used. So it could very well be the case
that a proposal is set up for a tag that is already widely used.

> So all is well now? "I got it rendered and I don't mind if anyone else 
> has a problem with it - or don't understand it" - you mean this kind of 
> solution?

What's wrong with this? It's a Wiki, the others can change it.

> This sounds pretty well, until you think about actually gonna *use* the 
> data. It's probably no fun to write a renderer for the 20000 possible 
> variations of 200 tag's (not to mention that it's ugly, hard to 
> understand, error prone, and slower to work with) - as a result for not 
> doing some proposal work "at the beginning".

Well you just write the renderer for the tags you think are
interesting, and let those who think other tags are interesting add
these to the renderer. He who writes the renderer has no obligation to
detect the 20000 different tags in the planet file and try to find out
what people meant by them.

There's no central command here and if there was, I'd quit.
(Well at least central command is pulling the strings silently.)

> And IMHO it's a much better way to think about possible problems first, 
> solve them (where possible) and then use a tag - in comparison to first 
> get a plethora of similiar tags and try to sort it out later. People get 
> pretty unflexible once they have used a tag for a while so fixing this 
> pletora later is difficult or even impossible in OSM ...

On the other hand, using a tag in practice will often yield some
insights that pure drawing-board discussions might not provide.
There's really no reason why you cannot start tagging something as you
like it, then play around with the renderers, sort out the problems
and then make a proposal based on your experience (or even not make a
proposal but answer questions on the mailing list with "well I tend to
tag these things so-and-so..."). 

Sometimes if you have worked with one thing and have had situations
where it somehow didn't look right, you might be much more open to
suggestions by other people!

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'