[OSM-talk] RFC: what are empty nodes and how should we use them?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Jonas Stein wrote:
> In the IRC channel i was told, that there are users who paint
> empty nodes in the map to mark things like
> "road is not mapped, but continues here"

I do this occasionally, and I'm sure I haven't made this up but got the 
practice from someone/somewhere else - when a way is drawn and you know 
it goes on but haven't mapped it, you put three "dots", just as you do 
in written language:

---------------  . . .

I'm not religious about it but I think it is pretty elegant because it 
does not require language to explain it - or at least that's what I 
thought until I heard from several people that they "delete empty nodes 
on sight" without further thought.

I mean - an empty node somewhere in the middle of town which has sat 
there for ages, ok, but if you saw something like the above, where the 
three nodes clearly hint at a way continuation - would you really remove 
them? I'd think that a bit careless.

In fact, I'm going to fix the JOSM validator to detect these cases and 
not complain - it is too easy for people to thoughtlessly hit "fix 
errors" and thus inadvertently remove information.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"