[OSM-talk] NoName

[Gervase Markham]

David Earl wrote:
> There are only really three solutions, I think:
> 
> 1. do nothing and don't worry about it

That's a really bad solution. That means that new people coming to the
project will think "What can I do to start off that's easy? I know, I
can put in the names of some local roads." Then they'll go out and spend
an evening discovering that all the ones marked red on the noname map
actually have no names. And they'll be annoyed that there's no way to
mark this. Repeat for many new volunteers in every area.

> 2. have a separate tag (as with noname=true)
> 
> 3. have a special value for the name tag (name=none or some such)

I find is really very unlikely that there is any important object in the
world which is known generally by the name "none" in small letters, with
no The, capital N, or anything like that. So I'd support this. It's just
another rendering rule - unless the renderer people want to tell us that
this sort of special-casing is particularly difficult to implement.

There's also:

4. Have support in the database for the equivalent of NULL, with the way
you mark it being editor-dependent.

Gerv