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

[Brian Quinion]

> > Implementing presets for this in the editor is a viable alternative.
> > But they need to be implemented in all editors - which could be
> > tricky?
>  An alternative is to have server-side processing, so the editor can upload
> data with something like "preset:crossing=toucan" and the server could
> translate any such "preset" tags on upload automatically.  If we were to go
> down this path, I'd suggest that rejecting an upload outright if it has any
> unknown/untranslatable tags starting with "preset:" so that the submitter
> _has_ to fix it so that it can be translated properly.

I like this - it has nearly zero client changes required (just coping
with a new error message) and anyone who didn't want to use it would
be free to ignore it.  The only problems I can see is that because it
is centralised it is somewhat out of user control - so maybe it should
make sense to pull the list of presets from a wiki page (once a day?)
and there would be a small amount of server side load to implement it.

>  If this is done as a true API change rather than a backwards-compatible
> kludge, I'd suggest it might be better to allow the editors to retrieve
> presets data from the server and do the translation themselves.  e.g. we
> could have a "presets" URI which the editors can download information from
> the server about what presets are possible.  This would require the editors
> are extended to support this, but it does mean that once the support is
> there new presets can be added for *all* editors by updating the database on
> the server.

I think some sort of quick marco language would be a bonus for all the
editors esp. if they shared a standard format for defining them,
although at that point I wonder if an api change is needed -
downloading a formatted page from the wiki might be as easy esp. if it
was cached by the editor.

I'll have a go at implementing a local macro system in JOSM and see
how well it works then it can be extended to pull from the server if
it seems worth having.

This might be a viable way of handling some country specific presets
too, so pre:de:highway=autoban

TBH regardless of the current discussion I think this would be a nice
feature so I'll write it!

Cheers,
--
 Brian