On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Alan Mintz <[email protected]> wrote: > In my view, OSM's lack of support for roads (which are polygons, not > lines) as polygons is a bug in dire need of fixing. > Technically, everything is a polygon, since a line cannot exist in the > physical world.
The line vs area debate is a perennial one and will not be solved any time soon. Least of all on the newbies mailing list :) In favour of lines: - much easier routing - much easier to re-use for many purposes: most of the time, the information that people want about roads is essentially linear. - easier to edit - less information required to create and maintain - better rendering at low zoom levels - more flexible rendering (how would you render an area as a dashed line?) In favour of areas: - more precise - allow calculations of other interesting kinds of information - better representation of the "real world". - less subjectivity - better rendering at high zoom levels This trade-off also comes up with rivers (riverbanks vs a line representing the centre)...maybe other things too. Me, I think the only real solution is a neat way to map both a line and an area, simultaneously. Draw an area, and also a line, tag them appropriately, and link between them. Then a renderer that can do a good job of areas could ignore the line, and vice versa. Steve _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
