On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Andrew Errington <erringt...@gmail.com> wrote: > The language of OSM should be precise. If it's not then people start > inventing tags that have similar, but imprecise meanings, which is > exactly what has happened here.
There's nothing more "precise" about 'potable' vs 'drinkable'. The suggestion of "migrating" drinkable=* to potable=* is just silly. In practice, it's very hard to 'migrate' any tag at all - even when there is a good reason, like the power=station mess. So let's just drop that idea. The only question remaining is whether to deprecate drinking_water=yes in favour of drinkable=yes (or vice versa). From my reading, they have slightly different meanings: drinkable=yes: when combined with another water source tag (like amenity=fountain), indicates that the water source is, indeed drinkable. drinking_water=yes: whether or not it's combined with any other tag (like tourism=alpine_hut), indicates that there is also drinking water available. You see the difference in the negative: drinkable=no: there is water but it's not drinkable drinking_water=no: maybe there is no water at all It's a slight difference in meaning, due to use in two different contexts. Of the two, I think "drinking_water=yes" is actually clearer and more useful. But because of the difficulties in "migrating" tags (changing tools, renderers, documentation, actual tags in the database, user behaviour...) I'm not sure it's even worth trying to fix. Steve _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
