On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Andreas Fritsche <andreas.frits...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't get it. Really? It's pretty straightforward. > You still know it's a railway, a highway, a > building, ... . Reading more tags will unveil the name, the operator, > the source and so on. There is no difference to a possible 'removed' > -tag. We've alway had certain key-tags that give clues about the type > of an object, others define properties. An easy example would be the > pair highway and name. Right, so have a look at the following. highway = primary => I have a primary road name = Foo Street => I have a primary road that's called Foo Street ref = 58 => I have a primary road with ref 58 that's called Foo Street abandoned = yes => I don't actually have a primary road at all. Do you see how the last one is completely different? If we start tagging things like this, then there's no way of telling what's a primary road without understanding *all* other tags. It's not just abandoned, there's also construction, historical, removed and so on. So it's a convention (and a pretty straightforward one) to only use highway=primary on things that are *actually* primary roads. Only use railway=rail on things that are actually railway lines. Using highway=primary on something that is no longer a primary road is just a complete PITA for everyone, mappers and renderers and all other applications included. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
