[OSM-talk] [tagging] Road crossings proposal - status?

[Steve Hill]

On Thu, 8 May 2008, Brian Quinion wrote:

> I like this - but would suggest a small change:
>
> highway=crossing
> crossing=zebra|toucan|pelican|...

No, get rid of the UK specific classifications of crossing completely - 
they require too much background knowledge to interpret and are pointless 
if you have already split out the various properties into separate tags.

> Where crossing=zebra is explicitly defined (on the wiki?) as a short cut for:
>
> highway=crossing
> crossingcontrol=uncontrolled
> foot=yes
> horse=no

I'm not a big fan of having many alternative ways of defining exactly the 
same feature.  A better way to implement "shortcuts" is to have presets in 
the editors which automatically set the appropriate tags.

> My feeling is this leaves lots of room for future expansion without
> breaking backwards compatibility with most of the existing data.
> What do people think?

IMO It just adds lots of redundent data, which massively complicates 
anything interpretting it (e.g. the renderers).  A clean change over to a 
totally new system would require no more complexity, but would make it 
possible for the complexity to eventually be reduced since the old tags 
could gradually be replaced with new ones (or there could be a bulk 
search/replace, but I know some people are opposed to this).

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence