[OSM-talk] Name vs name tag (case sensitivity)

[Ben Ward]

On 29/01/07, Robert (Jamie) Munro <rjmunro at arjam.net> wrote:
>
> Ben Ward wrote:
> >
> > Just a thought, but is there a great deal of point in having
> > case-sensitive keys?
>
>

We can write things into the and/or editors or the backend to enforce
>
this, or we can just ignore it and tell users to remember, and
> everything will work.


So basically it's the user's fault that he isn't aware at x time that he
should be using lowercase?  I appreciate not changing the backend for the
various reasons listed above (the foreign languages one was quite
compelling) but blaming the user for not having read the entire spec (or
wiki) is a bit unfriendly.


> Can anyone think of a situation where it's more
> > useful than it is confusing to have two keys with the same name, but
> > differing case?
>
> No. That's why you mustn't allow them.  As it is now, a key name in a
> different case /is/ a completely different name, therefore there is no
> room for that confusion. "Name" is not the name of an object, it's an
> error. Only "name" is the name of an object.
>
> If things were programmed to be case insensitive, then we could get
> different case names for the same key (on different objects), and
> renderers could get confused.


This bit confused me. I thought that's what was happening already.

Yes, editing tools are probably the place to do this. Having used JOSM and
the applet, though, I've always felt like I'm on my own for tagging and must
always have map features wiki page open, just to make sure I'm not
'polluting the data'.  It's clear from the number of repeat questions on
this list that there are editing conventions that need to be enforced, or
simply encouraged by the editor itself. [*]  If you consider these errors
then it seems a bit mad for us to accept them into the data.

Ben

[*] To be honest every update of JOSM I've tried has a different permutation
of tagging aids.  Right now I don't have the highway types dropdown any
more, but I'm buggered if I can work out how I got it in the first place.
Consider this a plea for help :-)
-- 
ben at crouchingbadger.com | http://crouchingbadger.com
51.717817,-1.225855
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