[OSM-talk] Potlatch and the evil semicolons

[Rory McCann]

There's a FAQ entry that says that you should use ";" as a value 
separator 
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Faq#What_shall_I_do_for_roads_that_have_multiple_values_for_a_tag.3F). 
Is this offical OSM policy? If so then, merging ways this way seems like 
The Right Thing for potlatch to do. Sounds like some renderers can't 
cope with this. Isn't that a renderer flaw?

I'm guilty of starting off this discussion. I was trying to tag a beach 
and I tagged a stretch of the way "natural=coastline;beach". This broke 
the coastline renderer. However what if you want to tag a way in such a 
manner? What's the right way?

Rory

Dermot McNally wrote:
> Probably one for Richard, but I'll send it to the list in case there's
> a background to why things are as they are...
> 
> I've noticed in the last few months many occasions where a road would
> vanish from the rendered map. On investigating, I'd typically find the
> road, but tagged along the following lines:
> 
> created_by=Potlatch ??
> name=High Street; Low Street
> highway=secondary; primary
> ref=R177; N54
> 
> It's easy to see why this won't appear on the map. Investigation
> confirms that Potlatch (at least a few weeks ago when I tested this)
> does this when you merge two ways with conflicting tags. This feels
> like dangerous behaviour, a fact backed up by the fact that I
> personally have had to fix at least 5 cases of roads eaten by this
> effect. Is there any reason Potlatch couldn't do what JOSM does, and
> require the mapper to commit to one tag or other in the event of a
> conflict?
> 
> Dermot
>