[OSM-talk] Country-specific defaults/values

[Tobias Knerr]

Roy Wallace wrote:
> "Differentiate with prefixes"? Messy... If "cycleway" means "A" in
> Germany and "B" somewhere else, then cycleway is not a good tag.
> Instead, we should explicitly tag "A" where it applies and tag "B"
> where it applies.

This would mean to totally get away from the concept of highway values
and move to separate tags, because "cycleway", "motorway", "primary" and
all the other values have different meanings in different parts of the
world.

I don't mean to say that this is a bad idea per se, but it requires
* good, universally applicable definitions for these separate tags
* exhaustive and complex editor support (having to look up and add a
whole bunch of tags for each road isn't an usable concept)
* clever rendering rules that can take multiple tags into account

Tobias Knerr