On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Steve Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Dave Stubbs wrote: > > > > either you're a human in which case most of the time you'll > > engage your brain and figure out what makes sense... or you're a > > computer in which case some nice human has programmed you with the > > relevant domain knowledge, so you know that highway=climbing happens > > to be what you're looking for. > > > > Seems to me that requiring that the computer or human needs a lot of > background knowledge about how the context is determined is a bad thing, > given that putting the context in the key (and thus removing the ambiguity) > is easy.
There is no ambiguity. You're inventing ambiguity where there is none. If there was ambiguity I'd agree with you -- there is none so I don't. Seeing as you're interested in the tag in the first place it's a fair bet you already know how to find the context very easily. > > > piste:lift:occupancy -- wtf? this can only ever happen on a piste:lift > > right? there is absolutely zero point in this tag.. call it occupancy > > -- the result is 100% identical. This is purely namespace wanking for > > the sake of it. It serves no purpose. None. Zip. Nada. The only thing > > this does is make the tag name very long, > > > > Of course it serves a purpose - it tells you that the value of the tag > describes the occupancy of a lift. An "occupancy" tag could be used to > describe attributes of different types of object - number of people in a > building, number of fish in a pond, etc. Without the name space you need to > get the context from somewhere else (one of the other tags... which one?) to > make it meaningful. And if the occupancy is on a fish pond then it likely does, but frankly if you're suggesting the average piste lift is also a fish pond then you have more problems than I care to go into. So yes you have to get the context from somewhere. Happily you're someone who wants to know about pistes, not about fish, so this isn't actually a problem: if [piste:lift] is not null and [occupancy] is not null then: print "piste:lift:occupancy = [occupancy]" wow. that was hard. And also demonstrates how completely pointless the namespace was. > > and add a pile of annoying colons. > > > > Who cares whether we use colons, underscores, spaces, whatever? I'm taking the piss. > > Your average user is quite happily going to type exactly what you tell > > them to. The chance of them remembering the key is probably reduced, > > > > Or the chance of them remembering which tags can be applied to which types > of objects is increased because the tag name makes it clear what sort of > object it will work with. I'd rate that quite high. > > > and the chance of them thinking it's ok to come up with new > > unnamespaced tags is also reduced which will either mean they won't > > propose things > > > > This is completely stupid - yes, they might avoid coming up with new > unnamespaced tags and *shock* propose new namespaced tags instead. Why is > this a bad thing? you snipped the or: they'll attach meaningless drivel to the start of every tag as a substitute which is effectively what you're doing anyway. > > > The chance of someone putting up a > > proposal getting spammed by people who like typing is also massively > > increased. > > > > Huh? > Basically, I'm convinced you know what a namespace is, but not why you would want to use one. What you're doing provides nothing extra: I can throw it away and be left with the same information. Dave _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
