Hi Martin.
You are right in that highway=footway is obsolete from a pure data point
of view, IF the application supports it.
On the other hand, it might be very likely, that the corresponding
street then gets a foot=no, as that's often the case, if you look at the
street without the footway.
From my point of view, highway=footway could be omitted as you suggest,
but on the other hand, that would break routing for pedestrians, because
the legacy/compatibility attribute highway=footway is missing.
The question is: is more data basically good or bad? Are
applications/developers asked to adapt their code to a changing tagging
system, or has the tagging system keep track of compatibility issues
with more or less outdated software?
In this case IMHO forcing devs (of software and styles) to adapt to the
new possibilities is better as the maps gets more and more cluttered for
software, that is not aware of the change.
Software/Style, that is up to date can cope with that, at outdated
software it's visible that things go wrong and people will complain
about it, until it's changed.
If in turn we remove the highway=footway tag, devs simply ignore good
ideas and features, because they are probably even not aware of the
possibilities inside.
regards
Peter
Am 10.04.2012 18:38, schrieb Martin Koppenhoefer:
I am coming back to a topic we had some time ago: sidewalks.
According to this page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:footway%3Dsidewalk
sidewalks should be tagged with
highway=footway
footway=sidewalk
While I agree that for complex situations it is helpful to have
dedicated geometry in OSM, I fail to understand why this should be
tagged "highway=*". Usually a distinct highway should be drawn only in
the case of a separated carriageway.
The suggested tagging is IMHO "tagging for the renderer". For tagging
sidewalks it would be sufficent to tag them with footway=sidewalk
without the highway-tag. In analogy to this tagging we would
optionally be mapping an ordinary street as dual carriageway and tag
each with highway=residential, oneway=yes, residential=lane.
New tags should be constructed in a way that doesn't change the
meaning of existing tags, but only adds detail to the existing meaning
in the case of a suggested tag-combination. In the case of sidewalks
dataconsumers that don't evaluate the footway=sidewalk tag will get
those highway=footway, which are tagged like this, wrong.
cheers,
Martin
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