[OSM-talk] place=small_town

[Tom Chance]

On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 21:16 +0000, David Earl wrote:
> On 25/11/2007 19:24, spaetz wrote:
> >> There's always a matter of judgement involved, and it isn't solely on 
> >> population, but at the moment I think the granularity is too coarse.
> > 
> > But population is actually a big part of it. And in order to keep things simple, I vote to use that if you want to distinguish things.
> 
> I think maybe the issue of how big somewhere has to be to be called a 
> town is different from whether there are enough gradations.

I think we should just admit that the way we want places rendered is
quite complicated, that we won't get enough people to enter tags to
cover every factor that we want to consider (official status,
population, amenities, historic significance, etc.). We should just have
a main tag for place type that conveys how it should be rendered, i.e.
what type of place it is.

If you look at a UK road atlas they tend to have various gradations:

* tiny village / hamlet (light, small black font)
* large village or with services (heavy small black font)
* small town (larger heavy black font)
* important town (heavy yellow font on green background block)
* city, metropololis (capitalised heavy yellow font on green background)

So really I think David's suggestion is more like
place=important_town ;-)

Kind regards,
Tom