John For highways I would say yes to your question. They are quite simple functional infrastructure units - it is what they service that becomes more complicated.
So for highways one has paths which are purely pedestrian (or perhaps mountain byc in rural areas ?); tracks only for farm vehicles and four wheel drive; and then various grades of other with, as you suggest, unclassified between small settlement areas and then the normal range of others depending on the size of residential areas that they are linking. I know from the correspondence that there is a concern that links to agricultural land or forestry only is separately identified. In that case I would suggest Farmtrack or similar. Tracks are valid between individual buildings, but would also pass through farmland, by for people on the ground it would be necessary easily to identify tracks that are going nowhere in habitation terms. As mentioned above, it is what this infrastructure serves that gets more complicated. What appears as fairly dense areas of buildings, but scattered over mountain sides such as Nepal or rural areas in Africa I would have trouble identifying as residential areas, no more than I would identify the scatter of farmsteads in Wales, (where I live). But in all these circumstances these scatters of rural buildings would be serviced by villages and small towns. It is inevitable that tags should get more and more complicated as time goes on, in much the same was as, say, the filing system on my computer has become. A sub-directory is set up, then a new item comes in, and this is then divided into more sub-directories, and so on, At some stage it is necessary to step back and review the whole thing, and I feel that this is the current case with tags. However, I am conscious that I am new to this and that the reasoning behind things are unknown to me. Andrew -- Andrew Patterson The information contained in this e-mail and any files transmitted with it is confidential and intended for the addressee only.
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