[Talk-us] Relations, cycle routes, shapefiles

[Peter Budny]

"Craig Hinners" <craig at hinnerspace.com> writes:

> Want to render the Oregon cycleway shield? Do so if the
> tag.key==cycleway:oregon and put the tag.value in the shield.

It was as if millions of programmers cried out in horror, and were then
silenced...

This is the problem with keys... it quickly adds lots of special-purpose
code to any application that wants to interpret the data.

Instead of saying "Render a shield for every relation of route=cycleway",
we have to say "Render a shield for every tag whose key matches
'cycleway:*', but not if the key is 'cycleway:backwards', and not if the
value is 'yes', and..."

Tagwatch currently shows 41 keys that match "cycleway:*" and are NOT of
the form "cycleway:<locality name>".  That's a lot of special cases to
encode in the renderer... special cases which aren't a problem when
using relations.
-- 
Peter Budny  \
Georgia Tech  \
CS MS student  \