[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - h==highway

[PAA]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> wrote:
> PAA schrieb:
>> There are more than 1500 misspellings of the tag in the european
>> database right now.
>
> Which you can fix within a few minutes if you are sure that they aren't
> intended.

It's possible that somebody could do that in a few minutes, but i
certainly couldn't with my current knowledge of the OSM ecosystem. It
seems like there's a pretty substantial knowledge gap between the OSM
"pros" and the average OSM contributor.

>> It doesn't affect me personally, but i think the
>> cumulative savings in time for all mappers over the rest of OSM's
>> lifetime could be substantial.
>
> If that's really a problem for anyone else, everyone will be using your
> super-efficient editing tool. Most likely you'll find out that many
> people are using templates, autocompletion or simply copy existing tags
> anyway and don't care about manual typing at all. Others probably prefer
> human-readable tagging.

I think you misunderstood me: this isn't a problem for me, anymore
than it is a problem for "everyone". It would be more efficient for
servers, clients, and humans to use a shorter tag for something as
universal and common as highway. The cumulative resource savings in
the future far outweigh any transitional, temporary inconvenience.
Still...

>> It's definitely not something to be done with all tags, but i don't
>> think you made a very good case why it's ridiculous for this one tag
>> that is both prone to misspelling and in greater use than all others.
>
> (I replied quickly this morning before leaving for work and forgot to write
> my main argument, should never reply in a hurry)
> With two synonymous tags you can get inconsistent tagging, like a way tagged
> highway=primary
> h=secondary

Now *that* is a good argument. Well, i had thought it was a win-win
kind of proposal, but i guess it's not entirely so. I'll keep looking
for other ways to improve efficiency.

Cheers,
P