[OSM-talk] mark a way as secondary

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 12:54:58PM +0100, Ben Gimpert wrote:
> Just a quick reminder -- the TIGER import is using the "highway="
> notation as per the Wiki, so any transition back to "class=" will
> require an enormous re-processing of the TIGER set.

Or it will simply require the understanding in a post-processing
application that rendering is dependant on multiple tags, as is already
the case with all data. 

Unfortunately, the lack of a top-down ontological viewpoint, while
decreasing the work for users in a learning curve sense, means that
post-processing for rendering is more difficult. This isn't too much of
a problem with post-processing renderers, but is much more so with
on-the-fly rendering, since you have to perform these combinations every
time you draw something. 

To that end, it would be good at some point for the OSM renderer to 
define what it wants -- and if a segment doesn't match those, and it 
knows it can convert something, to go ahead and do that. That way, the 
next time the renderer grabs it, it will have the correct tags, and not
have to do additional post processing. This also makes the data more
standardized without requiring someone to go back through and edit every
tag, which would probably be a royal pain, and it makes it so that it's
not one giant API hit to change all the data at once: it's changed as
it's needed instead.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer