[OSM-talk] Rendering street names across several ways

[Maarten Deen]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2010 18:41:13 +1000, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Igor Brejc <igor.brejc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This results in even more complicated situation and even more work to
>> maintain such data. And even if do you follow this practice, there will
>> still be huge amounts of "legacy" data which do not.
>> I think if two streets share the same name and are adjacent to each
>> other,
>> it is reasonable for renderers to assume it's the same street.
> 
> Definitely. I would go so far as to say that two connected ways should
> render identically to if they were a single way, except for the actual
> differences in tags between them. That is, the mere fact of being two
> ways or a single way should make no difference to the rendering -
> that's an error.
> 
> I can imagine situations where a renderer would want to repeat a
> street name, or place the street name across the gap (eg, when a
> street changes category, and hence rendering colour), to make clear
> that the two share a name, however. But that should be a deliberate
> business rule.

The problem is that if you go to a rule "one road, name displayed once",
you will have to search for the name of the road if the road is very long.
This might not be a problem with residential roads on lower zoom levels,
but it will with e.g. motorways on higher zoom levels.

Look example [1]. There is no name on the motorway (I've got my browser
about 1100 pix wide).
I have deliberately cut a local stream up to make the name render in more
places.

[1]
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.37798&lon=5.95429&zoom=15&layers=B000FTF

Regards,
Maarten