[OSM-talk] Suggestion: fallback tag

[Emilie Laffray]

2009/12/17 Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>

> On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:47 AM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Or if he were really serious about this he'd come up with a suitable
>>
>
> Was this mailing list always like this? I don't get it. I make a sincere
> suggestion for a tag that I think would be useful, and just look at the
> response. Where does it all come from? Someone smacks down the OP and two
> others immediately chime in with "+1". Am I out of line brainstorming here?
> Why the snide replies? Why so much negativity?
>

I don't think there is so much negativity in itself. It is just that
everyone is very opiniated about things should be done. I thought that
Frederik did an initial thoughtful email to your proposal, trying to explain
why your proposal wouldn't work. It is fine to brainstorm but not everything
that is thought about is necessarily worth investigating or debating more.
More precisely, the fallback that you are proposing would be relatively
heavy both on code and people. If you don't want to be heavy on people, you
would have to maintain an equivalence list somewhere in the software, or
elsewhere that you have to maintain. I don't see the point of adding such a
mechanism. If you want something to be rendered, you may want to spend
sometime looking at ways of contributing to the rendering. There was a
recent post about how to modify osmarender at some point. Maybe it would be
worth looking at it, and modify code accordingly if you feel strongly about
a feature that should appear.
In the end, OSM is a database, and how you are rendering a map is something
accessory, as "everyone" can set up the rendering the way they want. It is
the greatest strength of OSM that you can choose what kind of rendering you
can do. I think the map should deemphasized at some point from the main site
as more and more people want custom rendering.

Emilie Laffray
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