At 11:13 AM 9/21/2007, Dave Stubbs wrote:
I'm definitely against this idea!
For the record, I have no great urge to go metric ourselves; I just want
things to work, and perceive a point of failure in this. I realise that
programmers can easily add a comversion routine - but why cause the
problem? It's like the Millenium Bug - a bit of forethought would have
prevented all the hoohah, and work to make it all OK - & we coped with
that too, but can't we learn a lesson??
Yeah, if we'd just thought ahead the map feature would have stated
from the beginning that you should state your units. I remember my
physics teacher at school was very insistent on people stating their
units. Leaving the units off is quite a bit like not bothering with
the first 2 digits of the year for whatever reason.
I'm not so sure about that in the OSM context. My personal feeling
is that Map Features would be maturer with explicitly stated
defaults. For example, a residential, unclassified, secondary
highway defaults to paved/sealed unless otherwise stated. That gives
the guys working on rendering and routing an explicit rule to work on
but still allows quick and easy tagging in the majority of
cases. That being so, the issue in hand, units for speed limits, is
a simple case of deciding what the default should be: "kph unless
otherwise stated" or "the currently used system in the country being
mapped". There are obvious merits to both. My preference is the second.
Just my 2 cents!
Mike
Stockholm
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