Thank you, Kevin for your thoughtful and rather complete reply! Mark Wagner <mark+...@carnildo.com> wrote: > Of course, this only works for ordinary relations. If the way you > clicked on is shared by two or more relations, you need to go > through the far more complicated method of playing with the > relation-editor dialog.
It is no secret that using either iD or Potlatch for relation editing is difficult and error-prone, nigh unto impossible for novice editors to either understand or perform easily. By contrast, while it does take some practice to learn, I find JOSM's relation editor to be a straightforward method to edit OSM relations. In short, the "four pane dialog" (not strictly correct, but it pedagogically suffices) consists of "key-value pairs on top, (left and right); member elements and selections on bottom (left and right)." Along with the buttons to the left of and between the bottom two panes (sort, reverse, select, move, ...), you have all you need to edit relations. This is a modeless (not modal) dialog, meaning that while the relation editing window is open, selections (e.g. click, drag a selection box...) and operations (e.g. split or join...) can/should be performed on underlying data in the geography editing window. Taken together, these are the seeds of learning how to effectively edit relations in JOSM. Plug-ins that offer "power tools" beyond that? Well, caveat usor. I wholeheartedly agree with much said in this thread: both polygons and multipolygons are perfectly valid data structures to use in cases where choosing one or the other is a matter of taste, preference, use-case, or all three. (Some uses absolutely require multipolygons, and that is that, other uses offer a choice of polygons OR multipolygons, where one or the other are equally correct). Notwithstanding JOSM's current paradigm noted above, our tools have a ways to go before they present simple methods to edit relations (type multipolygon or others) so that all and sundry are comfortable editing them. OSM gets better at this, though it is taking some time to get there. I believe a most important result from this thread is that there are many use cases where either polygons OR multipolygons are correct. Really, we are not very far apart from rather fully agreeing with one another. SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
