On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, OJ W wrote: > Just looking at wikipedia, they say that beaches need to be formed by > gradual deposit of solids from dissolved in waves, which means (a) rocky > shorelines might not be a beach, and (b) definition of beach is confusing > enough that "rocky surface covered by tidal water" is a nice neat > unambiguous description of the feature.
I'd suggest we depricate natural=beach and recommend people use surface=foo, water=tidal instead. I'm not a big fan of putting ambiguous (or arbitrarilly decided) stuff on the map - far better to have hard facts such as what the surface is like and whether it is tidal and let the renderers decide how to render it. Of course this brings up an interesting question - do we have beaches around large non-tidal lakes? If so, maybe we still need a natural=beach tag (or equivalent) for them? > Whether anything renders it is another matter... ;) I don't think anything does. Osmarender certainly seems to ignore the surface tag when rendering natural=beach. A sensible way of rendering would probably be: 1. If it is tagged as water=tidal then there must be a surface tag and we can render it appropriately. 2. If it is tagged as natural=beach but there is no surface tag, assume it is sandy. 3. If it is tagged as natural=beach and there is a surface tag, render the appropriate surface. Most professional maps do a good job of blending the different surface types together (e.g. where rocky areas meet sandy beaches) - presumably this is hand-crafted by the map makers and I'm not sure we can convince Mapnik and Osmarender to do a good job (but anything is better than the nothing we currently have :). - Steve xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nexusuk.org/ Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk