[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[Roy Wallace]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Martin
Koppenhoefer<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/16 Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>:
>> Whitelegg<Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> In the UK I would tag such a path as foot=designated;bicycle=permissive;
>>> and pragmatically highway=footway for the moment, using the
>>> generally-accepted definition of "footway" as "urban surfaced path"
>>> (though would prefer highway=path; surface=paved)
>>
>> That is not the definition of footway. highway=footway is "For
>> designated footpaths, i.e. mainly/exclusively for pedestrians."
>
> that's the recent wiki recommendation, but I guess footway is far
> older than this definition from Jan 08. Don't know how many footways
> have been in the  db till then and how many were added afterwards not
> corresponding to this definition, but might be lots ;-)

Sure, but perpetuating deprecated definitions via the mailing list
without specifically indicating them as such (deprecated) is IMHO
damaging.