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

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-08-16 11:44, Sebastian Klein wrote:
>>If that's the case, I observe:
>>Deletion of attribute-less objects will never be a problem, as long as 
>>nobody tries to get information from that objects (not included from my 
>>point of view).
>
>The point of this discussion: There are people who get information from 3 
>empty nodes at the end of a way.
>_______ ...

Is this documented somewhere? I've removed untagged nodes that are 
scattered around from the various bugs and anomalies that have been cited. 
If I've removed someone's graphical ellipses, I'm sorry, but I've had no 
reasonable way to understand that they meant anything.

I think this is a poor fit for the OSM tagging data model. Acceptance of it 
could be used to defend people drawing other untagged constellations, like 
question marks and exclamation points, instead of using the fundamental 
accepted scheme (tagging) to communicate what they are doing.


>It is another way of saying "fixme=continue" on that way.

But it is easy in JOSM, for example, to create a toolbutton that does this 
with one mouseclick.


>  Although I consider this style a little old fashioned, we shouldn't 
> destroy other people's work, just because we don't like the way they are 
> doing things.

Agreed, though we don't have to condone it's continued use.


>So why not let validator detect these cases when searching for dup nodes? 
>There shouldn't be a problem with that...

It's certainly quite a bit harder to decide if there are nearby untagged 
nodes from the same changeset. Wouldn't it make more sense to write a bot 
to find these and tag them than to burden the validator forever with this 
special code? Should we at least vote on it's continued use? Do people that 
use it really feel that strongly?






>Sebastian
>
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--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>