You could do it as a relation. The river bank would be a set of ways (each of which shares its end nodes with the ends of one of the others), and you could have a role for the one or two ways which close the loop which says "this is structural, not really part of the river bank". The renderer would have to assemble the polygon from the constituent ways (start with one way, find the end node as the start node of another way and so on), but then rendering would be as per any other polygon.
It's a bit fiddly, but it removes the problems of the artificial connections across the water not eing idetifiable while at the same time still providing a complete polygon (albeit indirectly) for the renderer to work on. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk