Usage of the destination and destination:street tag with the street name

[mueschel]

@Minh_Nguyen

In the absence of fallback behavior, empty values in destination would probably make some existing routers oblivious to not only destination:street but also the other values in destination.

I really hope that no tool fails because of empty entries in a semicolon separated list. This is something I would consider a bug.
If the tool does not support the matching rules on a way that uses them, then no major harm is done. All the symbols, texts and refs would still be there, just positions in the display and word order in the speech output will be mixed up - and this is information we wouldn’t have at all without the matching value lists.
What might happen if a naive “European” tool is used in the US is that the reference numbers are not displayed separately at the top but in a column on the left side of the destination names. The tool still can name the references or symbols individually if it wants to. An intelligent choice of which pieces of information from the sign to use in the announcement is needed in any case - reading the whole sign or just the first entry as many tools do it today is not really helpful in many cases.

@Minh_Nguyen

I was referring to this sentence repeated throughout the table: “Describes the destination symbol for the complete OSM way.” I suppose the emphasis on “complete” was meant to distinguish destination:symbol from destination:symbol:lanes though.

I see. That’s how I read it. Maybe “Describes a destination symbol that applies to the whole OSM way (both directions and all lanes)”? Or we could remove the table altogether and replace it by some text mentioning directions and lanes separately.

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@mueschel

If the tool does not support the matching rules on a way that uses them, then no major harm is done. All the symbols, texts and refs would still be there, just positions in the display and word order in the speech output will be mixed up - and this is information we wouldn’t have at all without the matching value lists.

I’m referring specifically to the idea of shunting the street names over to destination:street, using these empty values as placeholders. That’s the scenario in which I anticipate that existing data consumers would have difficulty finding all the relevant information, because it is a redefinition of well-established tags. Even though this redefinition sort of happened several years ago by now, it clearly hasn’t met with the kind of success that perhaps a formal wiki proposal might have had if the community had discussed and approved it.