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

Brian Quinion openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk
Mon May 12 16:12:01 BST 2008


> > 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.

OK - but this means that even for the simple cases you have to enter 4
times as many tags.  People are lazy (well I certainly am!) and tend
to use the easier method - which means people stick with the existing
solution and ignore the new method.

>  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.

Implementing presets for this in the editor is a viable alternative.
But they need to be implemented in all editors - which could be
tricky?

Presets could also be implemented centrally server side as part of the
0.6 api change - i.e. an uploaded tag of
crossing=zebra|toucan|pelican|... could be 'fixed' on the server and
returned back to the client for display (I'm sure almost everyone will
absolutely hate this idea!)

> > 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).

As far as I can see the choice is either to make the renderers or the
editors work hard :-)  Unfortunately the only centralised location in
the current system is the database and I suspect most people will not
be happy with the DB changing the data any more than mass search and
replace.

--
 Brian




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