Hi, Gervase Markham wrote: > Names are unusual in this regard because there are certain classes of > things which one expects to have them (such as roads)
And that's what I wanted to say with my "tests" idea. It is not natural that a road has a name, it is just something that we expect. This expectation is in our heads, it's not in the database. We can write a test that checks whether the expectation is met - this is what the no-name map does. If you put "this road has no name" in the database, then indeed, from the programmer's perspective, why not also "this railroad track has no name"? > So having a "noname=yes" (or whatever - the syntax is unimportant for > this discussion) absolutely does not mean you need a "nopostbox=yes" or > a "notractorlane=yes" tag. I agree that the example was a bit extreme. But still; the concept that the absence of names for certain objects is noteworthy while the absence of names for other objects, or the absence of other properties for the same objects, is not, is a rule (or formalized expectation) you're putting up, and it will not be the first such rule. (I don't care too much whether you follow my suggestion of tagging a list of tests to be ignored for an object, or whether you stick with noname=yes, because any validator could trivially be made to understand both. I just wanted to get across the conceptual message that the idea of roads having names is nothing unqiue, just one in a long list of things that should go together. Railway stations will usually be connected to railway lines but maybe sometimes they aren't; will this necessitate a "not_connected_to_railway_line=yes" tag, then? You're unlikely to find a protestant chapel in a catholic graveyard and I could imagine a validator flaging this as a potential error; if it happens nonetheless, should we tag it as "different_denomination=yes"? And so on.) Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
