[OSM-talk] tagging trailblazes / marked paths

[Dave Stubbs]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Alex Mauer <hawke at hawkesnest.net> wrote:
> Andy Allan wrote:
>> What an absolutely terrible idea. This is astounding daft. If I have
>
> Yes, I am clearly mad.  I appreciate that.
>
>> chosen to render paths for cyclists, horse riders and pedestrians on
>> my map, why on earth would I want to accidentally render every other
>> variant when someone adds it? If I wanted to render every possible
>> future linear feature without knowing what it was I would use an
>> elsefilter on planet_osm_line and be done with it.
>
> Huh?  There's a difference between "any future linear feature" and "any
> sort of path".
>
> Say you've got a place with a variety of paths: bike trails, walking
> trails, ski trails.
>
> Now say that you want to make a map useful for biking that area, but you
> still want to show the other paths. (so that turning at the "second
> left" is still accurate)  So you render the bike paths in a green broken
> line.  Now, does it make more sense to have single rule for all the
> other kinds of path that you don't care about to render as a grey broken
> line, or does it make more sense to have separate extra rules to render
> footway, bridleway, and four kinds of skiway all in that way?
>
> And then someone maps the snowmobile trail that also goes through the
> area.  Is it better that it's now rendered like all the other
> special-use paths that you don't wish to highlight, or is it better to
> have to add another rule for snowmobileways?

If the point is to show all possible paths, then you'll also want to
similarly show all the roads as well? In which case an else rule on
highway=* would solve the problem.
So the only distinction created by highway=path is that it is of type
"path" which is a sufficiently broad spectrum of features from tiny
trails to wide tracks that it isn't actually much of a distinction at
all.

Incidentally (and completely irrelevant to the discussion), I just
found a few ways in Dorset, England, annual snow fall maybe one or two
days a year, which had recently been converted from highway=track to
highway=path,foot=yes,motorcar=no,ski=no,snowmobile=no. I'm fairly
sure that other than the lack of snow, skiing isn't actually banned.
Does anyone know why they might have done this? A preset somewhere
maybe? (anonymous user so I can't ask them).

Dave