[OSM-talk] Coordinates in OSM. Really annoying

Dave F davefoxfac63 at btinternet.com
Mon Apr 24 10:31:24 UTC 2017


Hi

I'm unsure why go on about anyone being "thrown out".

I'm unsure why doing it inconsistently in the past in 'legacy' code is 
any reason for not trying to sort it out for the future.

Programmers can reformat to any standard* of their desire /within/ their 
own program. It can't be hard to do; it is, after all, pure ASCII text.
What's irritating is the responsibility oft the syntax has been passed 
on to the end user.

What are the reasons the authors of the programs listed can't coordinate 
with each other to simplify it for users within OSM community?

* Are they really adhering to a 'standard' or just doing it one way 
because a competitor did it another?

DaveF

On 23/04/2017 08:29, Roland Olbricht wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Is there /really/ any need for *six* coordinate formats? It's hard
>> enough to learn a new process without basics like this tripping you up.
>
> There is nobody who is trusted enough to set an universal standard:
> https://xkcd.com/927/
>
> Basically, there is an ISO standard
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6709
> to have latitude before longitude. Leaflet complies, OpenLayers does not.
>
> This is for historical reasons. When multiple projections were 
> commonplace as exchange formats, then they often used x and y as names 
> for the two numbers, and x often decoded to something loosely or 
> tightly related to longitude.
>
> However, OpenLayers is too useful to be thrown out just for having the 
> wrong coordinate order. The same applies to a lot of other tools with 
> legacy coordinate order.
>
> To have a gentle pressure towards the ISO standard, the advertised 
> interface is latitude-longitude. There are some precautions for inert 
> legacy tools:
> http://dev.overpass-api.de/blog/bounding_boxes.html#lonlat_bbox
>
> As Lester has pointed out, XML requires explicit parameter names. By 
> the way, I am not aware of anybody actively using the XML syntax. You 
> can safely ignore that.
>
> For the delimiter question: There are programming languages with a 
> combined market share of almost 90% that agree to have to semanticy in 
> whitespace. The sole widespread-used exception is Python. Once again: 
> Are you seriously asking the OSM community for a crusade to throw out 
> Python for minor syntactic infrigement?
>
> Beside Python, the delimiters are always commas and semi-colons. As 
> commas tend to be used to delimit parameters, they are for the numbers 
> of the bounding box the delimiters of choice.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Roland
>




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