Peter Körner wrote:
Maarten Deen schrieb:
They tell you that the translation in the given language is identical to
the value of the name=* tag. If you see the name-Tag as a fallback for a
missing name:xx-tag (what you should), those pseudo-translations are
needless. I'm currently in a discussion with Marc Schütz (search through
the mails of the last days) if deleting them is a good or a bad thing.
I have read the above mentioned discussion[1] (unfortunately it is
spread among two mailing lists) and I have two additional points to make:
(1) Default tags can be changed. We should remember that default tags
can be edited by somebody later and they will no longer be good for
other languages.
(2) There is some inconsistency in default tags. Sometimes it's the
English name, sometimes it's written in the Latin alphabet, local
alphabet (e.g. Arabic) or both. I think Iran is spelt in Arabic, Comoros
are spelt in both. Some people say Burma, some say Myanmar for various
reasons. I think having explicit name:xx tags even if *at the given
moment of time* it's the same as the default.
That's said, I have added name:pl to Polska even thought it is
the default name, too. Therefore having name:de == Deutschland is
perfectly fine. In this case it actually indicates that the local
official language is Hochdeutsch (de or de_DE).
Therefore I would propose to remove orange tags from the utility -
such name will be either italic or orange and never normal.
Both carry notion of something being wrong with the name.
I actually wonder if the default tag is the right thing to have
altogether. Probably better might be to use some fallback order (say,
en,de,ru to be very European-centric) and displaying the name in
italic in OSM (meaning fallback language applied).
Some more intelligent fallback mechanism could be applied in the future
(using user's browser preferences for example):
- Browser says Accept-Language: zh;q=1.0, ja;q=0.2, en;q=0.1 - this
means I understand Chinese (say Mandarin) and a bit of Japanese and
some tiny English. For more details on that see RFC2616[2].
- The webserver sees that there is no name:zh but there are name:en
and name:ja. This user indicates it prefers Japanese to English.
Actually in this case Japanese is much better option for the users since
there are chances that the kanji spelling will be the same as Chinese,
like, for example, 中国 (same in the Japan language and simplified
notation of Chinese).
But this would require on-demand application of the negotiated labels on
the map and this technically might not be easy to be done in a feasible
name (it would be difficult to create pre-generated tiles for different
sets of user preferences).
[1]http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap/39745/focus=39900
[2]http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
--
Marcin Cieslak // sa...@saper.info
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