On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Mike N. <[email protected]> wrote: >> I'd like to announce my GSoC 2010 project which is nearing completion, a >> simplified editor for OSM aimed at beginner users. > > Looks great - I hope we can apply the concepts here to create simple > editors to encourage new users to participate.
Ah, something we need to clear up here: there's a difference between "simple editor/application" and "simple UI". There is no such thing as a simple editor. It's just not possible to be both "simple" and "working". The OSM data model is complex and sophisticated, and any attempts at a 'simple' editor will simply mess up other peoples work. Especially when you start touching relations, which seeing as relations themselves involve nodes and ways that's pretty much any editor. I say this as someone who wrote the "split way but preserve the order of route relations" code in P2. But even the simple "rename a pub" editor is more complex than most people realise. Naive implementations of a point-of-interest editor break down as soon as they realise that all POIs can also be represented by a closed way, and that these ways - both closed and unclosed - can be part of multipolygons. It's complicated. POI != node and Road != way. However, we can certainly do much, much better at making simple user-interfaces for these complex editors. In some cases we can hide the complexity - like making pub-as-area have an icon and be just as easily re-nameable as pub-as-point. But we should also split out the ideas of "simple user-interface" from "hardly any features" interface. An improvement I'd suggest straight away is to make road classifications a drop-down. But if we want to have editors with simple user interfaces (and I reckon we want that quite a lot) we need to realise that they will be built on top of complex, sophisticated applications. > One minor tagging note: It uses the tag phone= for the phone number, but > that is officially a rejected tag according to the Wiki. The recommended > tag is contact:phone= . Oh dear god, the wiki. How exactly something that is widely used and supported can be called "rejected" is beyond me. Never mind that it's apparently been "rejected" by a self-appointed group in favour of something that hasn't even been "approved"! Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
