Daniel, you wrote
On Sun, 31 May 2020 at 09:18, Daniel Westergren <wes...@gmail.com> wrote: > But words like path & footway is telling a different story and confusing > most mappers. > > And some say that highway=path either can mean a wilderness path or, if > used with foot/bicycle=designated, a combined, urban foot- and cycleway. > No, it can't, because often the latter case is tagged without access tags > and therefore impossible to interpret based on the highway tag alone. > > And herein probably lies the fundamental error of > 1. using words that people normally would associate with physical > characteristics, but to only mean function > 2. the default OSM rendering not considering physical characteristics > (particularly for non-urban ways) together with underestimating the extent > of tagging for the renderer (obviously people want their tagging to be > confirmed) > you are touching on an essential misunderstanding in this conversation, a misunderstanding that we encounter in many different discussions in OSM. Those " words that people normally would associate ...", i.e. "path", "footway", "track", ... are *code* words, they do not have any intrinsic meaning. Their meaning is defined by their use. The "path" problem is not a problem. A way in OSM tagged with highway=path (without any other tag) means a narrow, unpaved track, on which you are allowed to walk, cycle, and (in most jurisdictions) ride on a horse or on a donkey. A way in OSM tagged with the tag combination highway=path plus bicycle=designated plus foot=designated means a combined or segregated foot-cycleway. We could also have chosen, in the beginning of OSM, to define keys differently. We could have chosen "trail" or "sentiero" or "pfad" or "òkljdgpiodjg" instead of "path", the result would have been exactly the same. The convention in OSM to use British English terms for keys and values is a convenience and is meant to help memorizing keys and values.
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