On Mon, 11 May 2020 at 10:58, s8evq <s8e...@runbox.com> wrote: > Hi Paul, > > On Mon, 11 May 2020 02:10:12 +0100, Paul Allen <pla16...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I find the whole contact: namespace to be ill-conceived. But fine, if > > you want it then use it. Just please stop suggesting that we > > deprecate website=* and phone=*. > > What's you counter argument to the people suggesting that contact:* makes > it easier for data consumers to gather all contact info in one go, instead > of hard coding all the possible keys. What if next year a new way of > contacting comes up? >
Since you ask... What purpose does that actually serve? For mappers, no purpose. They use the editor preset and get phone=* or contact:phone=* depending upon what the author of the editor thinks is the right way to do it. No purpose for mappers who enter raw tags either - it's easy enough to create a wiki page for "Contact Tags" and list phone, website, fax, telepathy, etc. Maybe, just maybe, for newbies who aren't sure of what contact tags are available and want to be able to type "contact" into the editor and get a list of possibilities, but some editors do searches of brief tag descriptions that would achieve the same thing. But I'd argue most mappers operate on "I have a phone number for this POI, how do I tag it?" rather than "What contact methods are available for POIs, when I know that I'll check if this POI has any of them." For users, little purpose. They use the query tool in standard carto (or similar tool in other cartos) and get a list of tags. If a POI had dozens of tags then grouping the contact tags in one place might be slightly helpful, but in most cases not. For carto, no purpose. They ignore tags unless somebody has specifically put in handling code for them. They don't (and probably won't) render POIs with some form of contact tag any differently, so it doesn't matter if they don't code for phone=* or don't code for contact:phone=* because not coding to handle a tag requires no effort. For data queries, maybe a purpose. But first you have to convince me that anybody would have reason to perform such a query. Bring up overpass-turbo, move the map to a particular area, and find all the POIs which have any method of contacting them. Why would anybody want to do this? And if you can come up with a reason, how often is this likely to happen? Often enough that it's worth all the hassle of contact:*=* so that somebody can build a query on "contact:*=*" rather than "phone=* and website=* and fax=* and whatever=*"? The only purpose I've seen anybody mention for contact:phone is for a phone number to contact a car park's operator. And even that doesn't really seem justified. It's a phone number for a POI. The phone isn't physically at the POI but it's the number you dial to talk to the operator of the POI. I don't see any reason to make a distinction. I've yet to see anybody explain what a phone number is for other than to contact somebody. There are fax numbers, but they would be better handled by fax=*. As Gertrude Stein didn't say, a phone number is a phone number is a phone number. The contact: namespace seems to be taxonomic hierarchy for taxonomic hierarchy's sake. -- Paul
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