[OSM-talk] [OSM-newbies] avoid repeating the name tag twice

[Ben Laenen]

On Sunday 15 March 2009, Tal wrote:
> name:local_lang="fr - nl" is indeed an interesting idea, that I
> haven't thought of.
> However, I ask myself if it's flexible enough.
> It seems that for just a little more coding you get the much more
> flexible "{name:fr} - {name:nl}" (with special escape combinations
> \\, \{, \}  ).
>
> I think that mappers from Brussels and also other parts of the word
> with strings comprised from two languages should add there insights.
> Do they care about this problem? Are they willing to use such a
> solution?

Only if it's actually rendering both names, and only if it applies to an 
area that automatically adds the "local_lang=fr;nl" tag to all objects 
inside its boundaries (it's just a bad idea to tag every object with 
what it's local language is, you can override with a tag on the object 
itself if it's different).

I wouldn't do "local_lang=fr - nl" as the separator can always vary for 
the same object (you could have a dash, or a newline or just a space, a 
slash or a bullet or whatever), depending on what the person making the 
maps likes most.

But given the complexity of handling boundaries to add tags to the 
objects I think we'll be doing "name=Dutch name - French 
name", "name:nl=Dutch name", "name:fr=French name" in Brussels for a 
long time to come.

Greetings
Ben