On Mon, 12 May 2008, Brian Quinion wrote: > OK - but this means that even for the simple cases you have to enter 4 > times as many tags. People are lazy (well I certainly am!) and tend > to use the easier method - which means people stick with the existing > solution and ignore the new method. ... > Implementing presets for this in the editor is a viable alternative. > But they need to be implemented in all editors - which could be > tricky?
An alternative is to have server-side processing, so the editor can upload data with something like "preset:crossing=toucan" and the server could translate any such "preset" tags on upload automatically. If we were to go down this path, I'd suggest that rejecting an upload outright if it has any unknown/untranslatable tags starting with "preset:" so that the submitter _has_ to fix it so that it can be translated properly. > Presets could also be implemented centrally server side as part of the > 0.6 api change - i.e. an uploaded tag of > crossing=zebra|toucan|pelican|... could be 'fixed' on the server and > returned back to the client for display (I'm sure almost everyone will > absolutely hate this idea!) Oops, great minds. :) If this is done as a true API change rather than a backwards-compatible kludge, I'd suggest it might be better to allow the editors to retrieve presets data from the server and do the translation themselves. e.g. we could have a "presets" URI which the editors can download information from the server about what presets are possible. This would require the editors are extended to support this, but it does mean that once the support is there new presets can be added for *all* editors by updating the database on the server. > Unfortunately the only centralised location in > the current system is the database and I suspect most people will not > be happy with the DB changing the data any more than mass search and > replace. I imagine they would be unhappy about doing translation on arbitrary tags, such as "crossing", but people might be ok with having a certain tag prefix that gets translated - i.e. anything starting with "preset:" will get removed from the uploaded data and converted into real tags. - Steve xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nexusuk.org/ Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk