On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote: > Besides, the fact that someone made a mistake back in 2007 is not a > good reason to make a similar mistake today. There's no good reason > to replace hyphens with underscores.
There are plenty of good reasons. The fact that many people seem to like the hyphen variant means that replacing hyphens with underscores is not a crazy idea. Plus, we don't have to remember whether a value has an underscore or a hyphen. Our tagging system (at least for formal values) generally uses English words, but the syntax is not English grammar. Anyone with an good programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys and values have been constructed: lowercase letters and with underscores and using colons to provide a "namespace". Almost all programming languages do not allow hyphens in names of variables, functions, objects, and other identifiers (because the hyphens will be mistaken for the subtraction operator). While we don't really do programming with our tags, adopting the naming conventions of programmers makes things predictable and consistent. That's the reason why we have cuisine=japanese and denomination=roman_catholic instead of cuisine=Japanese and denomination=Roman Catholic. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
