I think the disagreement over the characters allowed in the tag keys is because of different views, what the keys are:
Stefan sees keys as a sort of identifier, which makes sense from a programmer point of view, thinking about hashes etc. It is also how many other systems are structured as Stefan points out. So there is some kind of attribute, which has an identifier as key and the data is in the value. In the OSM world we see the key as data, too. There simply is no identifier. Key and value both are considered data and so they need to be unconstrained (or with as few constraints as possible). So conceptually the key=value thing in OSM is much more just a convient breakup of a single data entity than an identifier with a data value. And while currently most keys have a simple form and are in English, it will not be that way forever as the project gets more international and people will start to add data that is more "local" in nature. In Germany there is the word "Flurstück" (note the umlaut). Its a sort of land parcel and it is used in the land registry. There is a very specific definition for this word how it is used in the German land registry and I rather suspect that definition is not in sync with definitions for similar concepts in other countries. So I should be allowed to use this exact word as a key instead of using some more generic "lang_parcel" or something that might have different meanings in different languages. Jochen -- Jochen Topf [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
