On 4/8/11 3:35 PM, Nathan Mills wrote:
Shouldn't the ref tag be an unambiguous reference to a given road in a
route network? Clearly, one should not put name=MI XX on a Michigan
state route (unless there is a road sign reading "MI XX"), but ref=MI
XX provides said unambiguous reference and can be easily translated
into the canonical name of the route. A name should go in the name
tag, anyway. Sometimes the name and ref are identical, sometimes
they're not.
Seems to me that the ref tag is much less useful when it's ambiguous.
Yes, we all ought to be using relations, but there's a lot of state
routes that don't yet have relations.
the ref tags on the ways, in their current form, get used directly by
the rendering systems.
i wish that this weren't true, but it is, and we have to deal with that
reality. we shouldn't
do off doing anything radical without a migration plan for the data
consumers that makes
sense.
most of the state highway pages for individual states in the wiki
specify a pattern for the
particular state, and many (most?) of these specify the postal code
approach, or at least,
they did the last time i looked. this approach dpes permit a state that
has its own
convention about what goes on the sign (like michigan) to set a
different standard for
the state.
i know NE2 likes to make the prefix go away for state ref tags, but i
have never agreed
with this practice. in particular, it's not great on the garmin displays
from
maps made with mkgmap.
richard
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
