[OSM-talk] Path rendering in the cycleway

[Gervase Markham]

Christoph Eckert wrote:
> I think we shouldn't vote on tags at all. Instead, we should monitor what gets 
> used most by the mappers (see Tagwatch and the tool announced by  
> Schuyler Erle).

I don't know about Schuyler's tool, but the massive problem with using
this "popularity-based" approach is that there are no added semantics.
OK, so several thousand people are using amenity=foo. Are they all using
it for the same thing? How can you tell?

There's no necessary incompatibility between the idea of Map_Features
being in some way canonical (in that people can fix bogus tags to
conform to it) and the idea that people should be able to invent new tags.

> IMO mappers "abuse" our two main renderers as a control mechanism if they have 
> done it right. As Spaetz pointed out, neither mapnik nor osmarender will ever 
> paint the same features. It's always up to the renderer to filter/decide 
> which attributes it likes.

And the lives of the renderer authors are made miserable if there are
four different ways to tag the same feature, all of which are used in
different areas of the map.

Gerv