Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Ruben Maes
2015-06-28 20:34 GMT+02:00 Fernando Trebien : > On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:03 AM, Richard Fairhurst > wrote: > When people are deleting and combining ways, they are editing > invisible data - tags and parent relations. In a world without > relations, combining different tags would still be an issu

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Fernando Trebien
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. Previous arguments surrounded exclusively on "should this be done" or "why it shoudln't be done". The "easy" word refers only to "how should user interaction flow be in order to avoid breaking relations", without resorting to non-trivial dependency analysis algori

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Tom MacWright
> I see that the problem in iD is really easy to solve (much easier than in Potlach). Please never say this. Estimating that someone else's task, in their domain of experience, is simple, is almost always incorrect, and usually overstepping. "This painting looks pretty easy to paint: can you finis

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Fernando Trebien
On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:03 AM, Richard Fairhurst wrote: > What is unacceptable is the relentless, harrying, dismissive, abusive manner > in which you and others advance the former view over the latter. That is why > we cannot retain developers. We really need to be careful to target the philoso

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Simon Poole
Am 28.06.2015 um 08:34 schrieb Jo: ... > > As far as the datatypes go, I would be all in favor for the area > datatype. I hear a lot of talk about it, and I don't understand why it > doesn't materialise. While we're at it, we should 'formalise' a few more > of the things we now use relations for

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-28 Thread Richard Fairhurst
Jo wrote: > even more sorry you stopped being the lead developer of iD For the record: the mantle of lead developer of iD passed to Tom and John immediately after SOTM-US Portland because it was wonderfully clear that their JavaScript skills are pretty much on a different planet to mine, and I

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Jo
Hi Bryce, I'm glad I'm not the only one who is of this opinion. You probably formulated it a lot better than I ever did in the tickets to complain about this behaviour. Anyway Richard, I respect you a lot, but if I notice there is a problem, nobody can expect me/us to remain quiet about it. So I'

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Bryce Nesbitt
On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Tom MacWright wrote: > > Okay, but most relations are invisible. > Relations are visible* if the editor makes them visible.* The iD editor introduced an entirely synthetic primitive: the "area". Thus, in iD, the "area" is visible. The iD editor, or an editor lik

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Fernando Trebien
Interesting, I remember long ago trying to upload (by accident) a set of relations with a cyclic dependency and receiving a server error. Maybe the message was phrased in a misleading way but the error was actually generated by JOSM. Will try again. Dependency checking must be aware of cycles, oth

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Paul Norman
On 6/27/2015 1:14 PM, Fernando Trebien wrote: Actually no, the server checks for circular dependencies, and a relation pointing to itself is a cycle. Try it, the server returns a validation error. Nothing in the OSM data model prohibits a relation that references itself, or relations that form a

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Tobias Knerr
On 27.06.2015 18:58, Fernando Trebien wrote: > When this notion of "grouping" is > presented at the very beginning, I believe people will easily > understand it for all of the advanced scenarios The notion of "grouping" would at least be more intuitive the common "relationship between things", whi

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Fernando Trebien
Well, this was not targeted at iD since Potlatch and Merkaator (and probably others) suffer from the same problem. Making the user understand the simple "membership logic" would be a great first step. The second one would be to develop apps (in particular, editors) that support all the variations

Re: [OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Tom MacWright
An "onboarding guide" which explains relations to the extent that a mapper could confidently edit them would be quite a bit more than that. Welcome to OpenStreetMap! This is a visual editor which lets you define things that you see in the world and their spatial component, specifically in a map

[OSM-talk] Mappers and apps should focus on relations at the very start

2015-06-27 Thread Fernando Trebien
This is surely going to spur controversy, but here I go. Imagine a world in which a new mapper opens its (newly-discovered) favourite editor and is presented with the following message the first time they edit anything: "You can map using points and relations. Relations are groups of things with