[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC -(man_made=mineshaft)

[Tobias Knerr]

Dave F.:
> Shaun McDonald wrote:
>> If you just add a disused=yes, pretty much nothing that works with the 
>> OSM data will recognise that it is no longer a cafe.
> Don't map for the renderer, router etc. etc.
> 
> You should be writing a post asking why they don't recognise such a 
> widely used tag.

Because tags like disused=yes conflict with a general principle in OSM:
We don't have a fixed set of tags and mappers can invent and use their
own tags, so it should be possible for software to ignore tags it
doesn't know without causing problems. If I don't support distinguishing
between different variants of amenity=parking, I just ignore parking=*
tags entirely, and while the result is less useful, it's still correct.
If I don't support disused features, I can just ignore disused=yes tags
... no wait, I can't.

Of course, in order to make mapping convenient, it's sometimes necessary
to break that concept (with access tags, for example), and probably we
won't be able to get rid of
disused/abandoned/construction/planned/proposed/etc anymore.
Unfortunately, people didn't seem to like my status=disused/... proposal
very much.

Tobias Knerr