On Jan 23, 2008 12:12 AM, Dermot McNally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So now let's consider items like distances, depths, heights and other > items that can be rendered in either metric or imperial (and for all I > know, maybe other) units. I happen to be a user of metric measures, so > I want to see mountain heights in metres, speeds in km/h and canal > lock rises in metres (regardless what country they're in) because > those are the units that make sense to me. Up until now, all such > units have, by OSM convention, been stored in metric units, which > obviously suits me just fine.
I think it should also be remembered that metric users outnumber non-metric users by about 19:1 and between imperial users they can't agree on everything (when is a pound not a pound). If we are going to go down this path then we should setup a list of officially permitted non-SI units with designated unit name (so we don't get confusion about 1foot or 2feet), whether "10ft 7 7/16in" is allowed (exercise: write a quick parser for that). Is it case sensetive? Not just claiming it's "standard" (the nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from). We could mandate that mph is the only exception, but if we're going to allow exceptions we should list them, because as you can see from the foot example, it's not just multiplying by a factor, you need a parser for some things. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://svana.org/kleptog/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
