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

[Dave Stubbs]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Maarten Deen <mdeen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:19:42 +0200, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It's the first that I heard of this strategy and I'm not sure if I
> would recognize it. I certainly haven't in the past.
>
> It does raise a question: why not just map a way over it and tag it
> with some FIXME? If I map a new area and make photo's and see that there
> is a road somewhere that I didn't go, I map the road as far as I can see
> it and.
>


I've no idea where I first came across it, but I have also used it as
far back as 2006. We didn't have any aerial imagery to trace, so if
nobody had walked down that way with a GPS you had no idea where it
was going, but you might have a name or something from the end, so you
put in a small stub road and dot dot dot. There also wasn't much of a
map viewer, or styled editing, so three dots was a lot more obvious
when editing than a tag.

In the world of validators, slippy maps, JOSM post mappaint, aerial
imagery and masses of POI/addresses it makes less sense, and is less
visually obvious. But I still like it :-)

Dave