> > Tirkon wrote: > > > I found some discussions within OSM, that it would make sense to offer > > > an OSM editor especially for beginners. To make it easy enough, they > > > should not confuse the beginner with complicated stuff like relations > > > and thus not show and support them. But does that make sense?
No, quite the reverse. The use of relations should only increase over time, but what is needed from the next generation of editors is to hide all of this background database detail. For instance, I don't want to create a relation of type multipolygon, I want to create an area; I don't want to create a relation of type route, I want to add a way to a route and so on. Imagine a proper WYSIWYG editor - you would simply draw an island in a lake and say "let it be grass" and the editor will do all the stuff with multipolygons in the background (creating them if necessary) to make it so. The user shouldn't need to know. Of course there will be diehards that want to manipulate this data at database level just as there are people who hand craft their HTML pages using Notepad rather than the "Save as HTML" option of their wordprocessor. Some editors will be more elegant in their manipulation of the database just as some wordprocessors create more elegant HTML than others, but that's not the point. As more and more detail becomes possible/desirable, so the editors should become more and more clever, possibly in cooperation with the renderers. I'm thinking of lanes, for example. The user creates a road and the editor creates 2 lanes and relation to bind them together. The renderer renders these two lanes as a road but the possibility exists then to create multi-lane roads without the user having to worry about the technicalities underneath. Just my opinion. Steve -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
