On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Norbert Hoffmann <[email protected]> wrote: > Andy Allan wrote: > >>And every time using :left and :right comes up, we all have a big >>discussion about it and then nobody pays any attention and it comes up >>again a few months later. > > Perhaps this is because the concept "left"<>"right" is so simple - and the > aversion against editors, that are not totally key-ignorant is not so easy > to understand.
And nobody pays attention. The main problem is that two-way roads have no inherent, real-world, "direction" - neither side of the road is the right or the left. Or rather, both sides of the road are the right or the left, depending on which way you are facing. The only place that right and left has any intrinsic sense is on one-way roads, which *do* have an inherent direction (and signs to that effect). Let's say you have a church beside a road. If it's a oneway street, it makes some kind of sense to say "it's halfway along the road, over on the left". Let's say you have a church beside a two-way road. If I said "it's halfway along the road, over on the right", you still wouldn't know which side of the road it is on. Now the problem is that most people at the moment in OpenStreetMap are tech-heads, and are so used to mental constructs and abstractions like every road having a completely arbitrary intrinsic direction - but that doesn't mean it's a great idea. Editor support is less important - and far easier to fix - than explaining to all the people who don't even realise that all roads have a direction in openstreetmap - and except for oneway roads, I have no idea which ways are pointing in which directions, and it shouldn't be important unless it *has* to be important. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
