2009/3/11 Tal <[email protected]>: > On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> This will result in the very commonly used name=* tag becoming useless >> for anyone that doesn't support this ad-hoc macro language once this >> starts being entered into the database. > > It will only be useless for parts of the world that care about > multiple languages. I tag in two languages, and the only reason I > bother to use the "name" tag, is that I depend upon the slippy map on > the osm site that uses that tag. If/when we had a local site, i'm > pretty sure we'd not be using the "name" tag, and your tools would > still need to be changed to properly use names in that area. > Besides, even now it is somewhat useless, because you don't know what > language you're getting. I tag name and name:he with the same value. > Previously, and even today, people tag "name" as name:en, or > transcription of name:he with Latin letters, or even - both Hebrew and > English in the same "name" tag. > A simple preprocessor before the tools could always change the data to > the way they need it. But the regular mappers are better off working > with that data model, and seeing it rendered in order to continue > mapping and fix errors. >
So fix the editors instead. There's one option been pointed out already: use a separate tag to tell you what language the default "name" tag is. The editor can happily write the name to both name and name:* tags, write a language to some other tag, and provide validation that everything is working as expected. The fact that macros/redirects will confuse large numbers of people, and introduce a stage of complication and parsing into a previously raw tag which none of the existing tools will be expecting seem like good reasons not to continue. Oh and I'll update my threat from the no-names thread of ages ago: if you start doing this I'll make it my life's work to get on the local council to name as many features as possible as "$(name:fr)" with an explicitly stated french translation as "$(name:en)". Dave _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
