> > On 10/15/2010 09:44 PM, Richard Welty wrote: > > Sans prefices, the highway=motorway where US Highway 10, Wisconsin Highway > > 66, and Interstate Highway 39 run together would have ref=10;66;39. Not > > very useful for determining which is which.
This is why I keep arguing for using *non-ambiguous tag names*: the "what" should go in the tag name, and the "which" should go in the tag value. So, instead of the current situation where we have half a bazillion ways with a "network" tag name, you'd have: network:country[US]:unitedStatesHighway = 10 network:country[US]:state[WI] = 66 network:country[US]:interstate = 39 (Or, if you're of the brevity and ambiguity trumps verbosity and clarity camp, I give you "network:US:WI", "network:US:US", "network:US:I".) Point being, by making a clean separation between the "what" and the "which", it makes it easier from the standpoint of an automated agent of OSM data, be it a renderer or whatnot: you have a clean query on the tag /name/ to get all routes of a certain classification (the "what"), regardless of /which/ route number it is. No endless parsing of the tag value, looking for "I-" to determine whether that way is an interstate, oh, oops, this guy doesn't like hyphens, I need to look for "I*", oh, oops, that gets me everything for Iowa and Idaho, oops, now my function to determine whether a way is an interstate is 10000 lines long with 500 "if" statements and regular expressions that would make a CS major run for the hills. No, none of that. Simply: if tag name = "network:country[US]:interstate", render the AASHTO shield with the number(s) in the tag value. Easy peesy. No arguing about relations, super relations, super duper relations, relations of relations of relations of sub-relations, orphan relations, bastard relations, divorced relations, etc. You just tag the ways with these non-ambiguous tag names. Relations are WTFs of complete and utter proportions. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
