I find landuse to be superfluous here on the South coast of England. In nearly all urban cases, the ground floor is retail or commercial, with house=yes in all floors above. This mixed use makes a defined area of landuse disruptive, unhelpful and misleading.
Also, landcover=grass, used for instance to describe a small grass area is not rendered in openstreetmap.org in the same way as it would be for landuse=grass.
This all seems very clumsy to me. Has this been discussed before?
There have been a number of mail list discussions about ālandcoverā in the past. I personally like using landcover=trees, landcover=grass, etc. Because I donāt have to decide what the use is. For example when dealing with trees, are they being āusedā for forestry, recreation, watershed management, etc.
But I have been on the minority with this opinion and the people maintaining CartoCSS (for the āreferenceā rendering of OSM data on the main OSM website) have decided not to support landcover tagging. So I generally will use both the landuse=* and landcover=* tags and my personal rendering looks first for landcover.
I use landuse=grass for non-agriculturally exploited grass patches, city dressing so to speak. Renders fine. The landcover is FAIK a a non-rendering key in Carto standard.
Looking forward to the day an epiphany hits and the decision is made to render fell as scrub, for Peteās sake an area on the OSM map the size of Scandinavia looks like it still needs mapping and it catches me out time and again. We have grassland, grass, meadow⦠even under microscope they look the same. Take a landscape of vineyards and orchards⦠you really really have to use the 20x magnifier, same in texture and exact same green. For something so up in front for most viewers it sure is treated as the bad orphan.
If I knew how to make a ābestā or ābetterā rendering map showing on the OSM site, image below, Iād switch in a heartbeat. Itās where JOSM jumps one to clicking the link to the change set view just uploaded. Itās where I go after uploading a CS to ogle if all shows up (except the building:parts for which I returned to F4 as SGLās instant updating went AWOL)
I like the French Carto rendition which for instance shows the (correct) lining on sports pitches (in ID edit mode only) but canāt remember seeing one that actually does have a depiction for fell of which we have some mapped zones here on the mountain slopes such as
Incidentally those tiles (and the map at map.atownsend.org.uk) is less precious about tags like landcover=grass and might solve some of @UtterClutterās issues above in the South of England.
Following this page is pretty simple. Italyās about the same size as Great Britain in OSM terms; a server to handle a āniceā rendering of it (perhaps even based on OSM Carto, but with some of the low-level gripes fixed) would cost about ā¬15 a month - not a massive amount of money if a few people chip in. Also, OSM Italia is part of Wikimedia Italia so you could try rattling a tin in their direction.
A while I ago, I tried to offer a solution but not enough people agreed. While I also begin to see the disadvantage of the :secondary, :tertiary tags, a tag :additional=commercial;residential seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Speaking as someone in whose vicinity there are lots of fell mapped, Iād prefer those rendered as heath, trust me Maybe that tells us something about why fell is not rendered in standard view?
Itās funny because we got fell and heath mapped side by side, but than we got grass, grassland and meadow side by side and thereās no telling, but yes, looking at pictures, āif natural=fell than render as heathā would do fine, long at thereās feedback on the standard map that (large) areas have been mapped.
(I like the farmland render as it has light outlines so the plots can be made out).
Usage of natural=fell is a bit inconsistent (in the UK at least when I last looked there were multipolygons, linear ways and nodes with the tag). I ended up with this test (ārender as heath unless itās been mapped on a highwayā).
In many ways natural=heath has been the loser here - much of what is mapped (in the UK at least) as natural=heath isnāt really heathland at all.
Itās examples like this why itās really, really useful for people to experiment with their own renderings and not survive on the thin gruel that OSM Carto supplies!