On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 04:57:33PM -0400, Anthony wrote: > On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Jochen Topf <[email protected]> wrote: > > Technically this would mean changing the API to check > > for those characters, removing any that are already in the database (can be > > done with normal manual edits because there are so few cases) and adding > > checks > > to the editors so that they can give meaningful error messages. > > To be clear, they'd still be in the database, in the history. > > Which is one implementation problem, because it means putting checks > in more than one different place. At the very least, the regular API, > and the Potlatch API, but there are probably multiple places within > the regular API where things would need to be checked.
But thats much fewer places than all the software out there. The whole point of an API is that its a sort of "choke point", a single place where things can be checked. > And then any software which relies on these changes wouldn't work with > historical data. Thats a problem, you are right. We could solve that by faking the history. Not the first time this has been done, it would be possible. But most software out there only deals with current data. So even if we keep the history, that software would be made easier. > It could be done, but to do all that work just to make it easier to > code Taginfo would be, in my opinion, a waste. Especially when there > are plenty of simple solutions within taginfo. If URL encoding is too > painful, use a modified base64 encoding of the unicode string (using > "-" and "_" instead of "+" and "/"). Its not only Taginfo. Every software out there would be made easier. If this would be a Taginfo-only problem I wouldn't propose it. One of the biggest problems is that Taginfo doesn't work alone, but wants to work with other tools. If I use base64 encoding then people would need to link to something like http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/keys/aGlnaHdheQo= instead of http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/keys/highway. And the link then to XAPI would not be http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/*[highway=*] but http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/*[aGlnaHdheQo==*] . Not very user friendly. And then every service would probably use different encoding schemes... I have actually thought about that and might offer a secondary interface to Taginfo using base64 or something like it if I can't avoid it. But thats really ugly and probably nobody would use it anyway, because nobody wants to write special cases for the few keys that use those characters and are bogus anyway. > For cleaning up the keys, I'd want to strip down to as few characters > as possible. There's no point supporting most unicode characters - > keys are supposed to be in English. No. English people should be allowed to use their own language if they want to. So should speakers of every other language on the planet, too. Jochen -- Jochen Topf [email protected] http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
