Standalone webpage for browsing presets

[1ec5]

We should create a standalone webpage for browsing id-tagging-schema presets that’s easy to use without knowledge of JSON or this repository’s structure.

Background

In tagging or onboarding discussions, I often find myself using the standalone iD preview on Netlify or this GitHub repository’s search box to translate a real-world term into a tagging suggestion or vice versa. This workflow requires some insider knowledge about how the repository is structured or how to use iD’s raw tag editor.

People often refer newcomers to the OSM Wiki’s “Map features” page because it offers a high-level overview of all the available tags on one page, a better starting point than using the OSM Wiki’s search engine. Ideally, an iD user should be able to access all the tagging documentation they need from within iD, but sometimes people need to refer to tags in other contexts. Users of other editors may gravitate toward documentation that lives outside the editor.

Unfortunately, the “Map features” page is reaching the limit of MediaWiki’s capabilities, because it has to transclude content and links from a very large number of independent pages. This problem is essentially the same whether the page is based on transcluding disparate content pages or data items, because MediaWiki’s core content model is a document-oriented database. Taginfo can make popular tags available, but it only traffics in raw tags, and the documentation it extracts from the wiki has large gaps, especially outside of a handful of languages, because it ignores the translated descriptions in data items. Besides, the wiki doesn’t maintain names of features, only descriptions.

“Map features” is the product of a good deal of curation. In principle, one could create a listing similar to “Map features” using a simple SPARQL query in Sophox, but even if Sophox/sophox#31 were fixed, the listing would be as untidy as the wiki itself. This repository is also curating tags, but at a higher level of abstraction. The presets in this repository would be more educational to mappers than a table that only lists one tag for each feature, even when a tag may only makes sense in combination with other tags.

Proposal

A simple standalone webpage would list each preset in this repository, organized by category, listing any aliases and the tags applied. Selecting a preset could show a brief description and image based on either taginfo or the linked data item, like in iD, with a link out to the wiki. There could be an option to set the language and region of the presented presets.

Publishing this webpage probably doesn’t require anything more complex than GitHub Pages. id-tagging-schema’s built package is already distributed over the jsDelivr CDN, so it could be just a static webpage that loads the latest JSON files from there. A static webpage can be deployed anywhere. It could even be implemented as a gadget or user script on the wiki itself.

In contrast to osmlab/osm-planning#27, I don’t envision this webpage taking over the wiki in general, but it would serve as an alternative to the “Map features” page that’s increasingly broken and has never served as many language communities as this project.

[mnalis]

I'd like that. Searching the wiki directly is a chore (and Map Features especially has problems), and Tagfinder is also having problems finding things recently.