[Talk-us] Route Relation Nitpicking

[Zeke Farwell]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:26 AM, Apollinaris Schoell <aschoell at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> mentioned earlier already. the ref tag is taken by a standardization in osm
> worldwide. sure osm is free and everyone is allowed to change things but
> then don't expect to get any useful rendering anywhere. it doesn't matter if
> it's technically possible. if a different tagging is needed then introduce
> new tags or use a namespace like
> ref:"don't like the old tag and"=7
> don't tag for a specific renderer and more important don't tag against all
> existing renderer


Yes, the ref tag rendering on an oval is the worldwide OSM standard but this
doesn't work very well here in the US.  In a lot of other countries the
actual reference number (on the sign) has a letter prefix (A22, E51, M3,
etc) this makes it very easy to tell what network the road is a part of from
the reference number so the OSM standard works.  In the US the reference is
simply a number, and the network is generally represented by shield shape.
 I 89, US 7, and NY 9 are all fudged reference numbers in order to make the
map look (somewhat) right to us americans.  The actual reference numbers are
89, 7, and 9.  Unfortunately here in the US you need another piece of
information to get the whole story.

If we stick with the current standard of a network prefix in the ref tag, we
could utilize the nat_ref tag for just the actual reference number.  Then a
renderer could choose to use nat_ref and network to render a great looking
US map with proper shields and numbers, or just use the regular ref tag and
still avoid confusion.  This would be more work/confusion for mappers but
would offer easy options to renderers.  Alternatively ref could be just the
number and int_ref could be network prefix and number.

Zeke
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