[Talk-us] Network tag Re: Highway Shield Rendering

[Craig Hinners]

Phil! Gold <phil_g at pobox.com>:
> It seems to me that network=US:US:Business:MD is the logical extension of
> a scheme that has US:US and US:US:Business.

My initial reaction is that this goes too far in mixing geographic,
classification, and rendering concepts, which has a bad smell:

* It forces one to state explicitly what is already available implicitly
somewhere else: if a renderer wants to display a Maryland-specific US
Business shield, then it can already do so by determining whether the
point at which the US:US:Business shield is to be rendered is within MD.
Alternatively, the renderer could look for a "responsible agency" or
"owning agency" style tag. (I don't even know if such a tag exists,
admittedly.)

* It forces mappers to have knowledge of which agencies use non-standard
shields, so that they can break the relations at those agencies and add
the agency-specific tag. (Whereas, where agencies use the "standard"
shield, relations can stretch over agency boundaries.)