[OSM-talk] The Proposed Great Colour Shift

Thu Aug 20 10:16:33 UTC 2015

I must admit I never really liked the scheme where motorways get the colour
of water... I also grew up with orange/yellow motorways on the map.

But I (try to) complain as little as possible. So I'm glad people are
trying to come up with a 'more international' way of rendering the map. If
that's even possible.

On the other hand, I don't like that the difference between tertiary and
unclassified/residential disappears almost completely.

I don't have the time and energy to set up a rendering chain, so maybe I
better shut up...

Polyglot

2015-08-20 11:59 GMT+02:00 Paweł Paprota <ppawel at fastmail.fm>:

> What you are proposing is basically design by committee
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee) which is rampant
> everywhere in OSM and kills innovation. Everyone wants to pile on their
> own cause - be it privacy (see the latest pull request on Github
> regarding Gravatar for another viable contender for the Waste of Time
> prize) or some weird anarchy/freedom/whatever world views.
>
> At the same time there's a guy (Mateusz) who took on the task of making
> the default style not suck - so what do people here do? Of course, let's
> discuss this to death until everyone agrees. But then you may find that
> no one wants to work with you on this anymore.
>
> In Poland we have this often-used saying with regards to the political
> or social situation (yeah, we Poles like to complain a lot!) - it sucks
> but at least it's stable!
>
> Paweł
>
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015, at 11:39, Colin Smale wrote:
> >
>
>
> >
> > That discussion is only a waste of time because people hope that a
> consensus will magically appear. The subject of the discussion is
> absolutely something which deserves air-time. I am not talking about the
> specific case of abandoned railways, but about who has the right to decide
> what data has no place in OSM and order its deletion.
>
>
> > What was that famous line in Animal Farm again?
>
>
> > --colin
>
>
> > On 2015-08-20 10:53, Paweł Paprota wrote:
>
>
> >> I'm taking bets on whether this thread will have more replies than the
> >>  "abandoned railroads" (100+ and still going strong!) and win the prize
> >>  for the Biggest Waste of Time in OSM for 2015.
> >>
> >>  YES WE CAN('T)
> >>
> >>  Paweł
> >>
> >>  On Thu, Aug 20, 2015, at 03:16, Jóhannes Birgir Jensson wrote:
> >>> For those that did not check on Mateusz Konieczny diary entries[1[
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35586]],
> >>>  postings to this mailing list and github discussions then the Proposed
> >>>  Great Colour Shift might come as a surprise if it is implemented.
> >>>
> >>>  According to the github discussion there is an "overwhelming
> consensus"
> >>>  [2] on moving from current rainbow colour scheme for roads to a
> >>>  red-yellow only scheme. I am unsure of where this overwhelming
> consensus
> >>>  formed because I never saw it on this mailing list nor on talk-dev nor
> >>>  on announcements, I admit to be an infrequent IRC user but I didn't
> see
> >>>  this overwhelming consensus there and so far no one has been able to
> >>>  tell me where it formed or where I can find it.
> >>>
> >>>  The design goal seems straight forward, to discontinue green and blue
> >>>  for roads and move to red and reddish. For this to happen the decision
> >>>  was made to shift current primary, secondary and tertiary colours
> >>>  "upwards" so primary is now the colour of secondary and secondary the
> >>>  colour of tertiary. Leaving tertiary white.
> >>>
> >>>  Tertiary instead gets to be wider than residential and unclassified
> >>>  roads, but to be able to spot that you need to have it next to them to
> >>>  see which is the wider one.
> >>>
> >>>  This one simple change of bleaching tertiary however is something I
> find
> >>>  to be a great hindrance to mapping efforts, particularly in rural
> areas
> >>>  where the roads are isolated and panning over the map, wether in iD or
> >>>  using default tiles. Currently it is easy to spot tertiary roads
> snaking
> >>>  through valleys and over vast desert plains, they are yellow and the
> non
> >>>  tertiary roads are white. Tertiary is significant there as it denotes
> >>>  the roads between the villages and towns that are often unpaved but
> >>>  still the most important, even the only, road. Lesser white colours
> >>>  imply the roads not being between larger settlements although they
> could
> >>>  lead to hamlets. The guidelines for mapping in Africa state thus.
> >>>
> >>>  Removing the colour from tertiary makes all mapping that much harder
> to
> >>>  verify and quality check. Currently it is easy to see if a tertiary
> road
> >>>  is broken with a white unclassified bridge, not so in the proposed
> Great
> >>>  Colour Shift.
> >>>
> >>>  Mateusz has been forthcoming with all changes and done sterling work
> in
> >>>  displaying different areas and how they will look. But he acknowledges
> >>>  that this change is not beneficial everywhere on the map and now has a
> >>>  disclaimer:
> >>>
> >>>  "Among potential problems are that it is now harder to recognise road
> >>>  type of given road, especially in situation where there is no
> >>>  possibility to compare it with other road types.
> >>>  Such significant change will be confusing for current users of this
> >>>  style.
> >>>  UK color coding of roads is well known for many people, for them a new
> >>>  style - even assuming that it would be intuitive for them - will be
> less
> >>>  useful.)"
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>  The question really arises if this change is beneficial or not for the
> >>>  project. Many hours have gone into it and doing CartoCSS on all these
> >>>  zoom levels is not trivial. But this is a major shift on the front
> page
> >>>  of our website, a blow to those who use the default tiles through uMap
> >>>  or similarly and depend on the UK rainbow road style and makes life
> >>>  harder for mappers to visually confirm the type of road.
> >>>
> >>>  Should this be a new, alternative style instead?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>  [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35586
> >>>  [2]
> >>>
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1736#issuecomment-130592532
> >>>
> >>>  _______________________________________________
> >>>  talk mailing list
> >>> talk at openstreetmap.org
> >>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
> >>
> >>  _______________________________________________
> >>  talk mailing list
> >> talk at openstreetmap.org
> >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
> > _________________________________________________
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> > talk at openstreetmap.org
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>
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