Peter Miller wrote: > All I ask is that we have a consistent recommendation across OSM > for units. Ie, do units have a space before them or not as a preference? > > Can I suggest you adjust the recommendation back again?
It wasn't worded as a recommendation - just someone deciding that the space was important and drawing attention to it, even though the RegEx suggested otherwise. And when I started mapping (as you'll probably remember) the recommendation was to convert everything to km/h and not include units and I vaguely remember discussing then how silly that was. Similarly with maxheight and maxwidth and I was in some discussion with Bob Kare on how best not to highlight say 12'3" as an error in maplint (in the old maplint days, and again the spaces between 12' and 3" were optional even then) The consistent recommendation that I'd recommend is that it doesn't matter whether there is a space or not between the numeric value and the units, which is what the documented regular expression on the wiki page copes with, and what any consumer of the data can also easily cope with. I would be surprised if any consumer of the data who cared about parsing maxspeeds didn't start by removing all white space in the value field and checking what was left (in case for example someone accidentally added 2 spaces). Anyway JohnSmith has "reverted my pointless edit" since I made it, which in some people's eyes means I'm probably right ;) Before someone added the space to the main wiki page, the discussion page [2] says without was in the majority by 4649 to 173 but it got changed for "typographic reasons" overriding what was then the common usage, and between 5th and 29th April 2009 without was the main documented convention [1]. [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Key:maxspeed&oldid=2 51044 [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:maxspeed#Spaces_before_u nits Ed _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
