Hi, Sorry if this would be better suited for talk (or another) mailing list. Just following a thread that was started here, for good reason.
Sincerely, I am surprised to see that there could be "tension" around that proposal. It is not about adding objects to the map, but actually about removing part of the casing of objects that are already there, so this should make you happy, Andy ;-) Martin, this is precisely about the rendering of information. Maybe you never checked how the data you had entered was rendered. I confess that I do sometimes. It can help find errors. And I think it can help particularly in the case of fledgling OSM communities, or beginner mappers. If you read the thread of discussion I was pointing to, you can see that there were also worries about not misrepresenting the actual status of "roads" to map users. I've also seen this worry in other geographical contexts. It is in this sense that a more accurate rendering would help mapping. (And of course, these conditions are not the easiest in which to run customised renderings). The dotted line convention is common to the (French) paper maps that I can look at. Applied to ways that would be there anyway, it does not seem to clutter the map, on the contrary, it makes it more readable to me. Of course, you can say this is subjective. But it happens to be there on topographic as well as road maps. This probably means that this is considered an important attribute of roads. On a related theme, about "web maps", there was a recent discussion on talk-fr about G. now using data from the Institut Géographique National. Many examples were given of "ways" that are rendered the same as standard roads, even though they are either not drivable, private or even exist only as projects. Is this the kind of rendering model OSM would like to follow? Do you think it would encourage a good quality mapping? Or trust from the users? It is only natural, and fair enough, that the rendering compromises were apparently tuned for the UK, since OSM started there, or similar countries. But if the aim is to map "the whole world", where the global proportion of unpaved roads or streets is much larger, then maybe slight adjustment to these compromises could be considered. Of course, I don't know what the cost (in time and resources) of this modification would be, nor how the Mapnik team proceeds to test the modifications. It just seemed, maybe naively, like a reasonable modification to suggest for potentially large benefits. Best regards, Jean-Guilhem -- pgp 0x5939EAE2 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
