Multiple delimited names in the name tag

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@SimonPoole

and @Minh_Nguyen was asking for all punctuation to be converted to semi-colons, not just handling the odd misused tag

I asked for no such thing. In this thread, I asked for the community to be aware of the longstanding usage of semicolons as an option, so that data consumers could support it without fear of a backlash. In a way, my request has been denied. (To clear up any confusion, the word “support” can mean “to know what to do with”, not necessarily “to campaign for”.) Unfortunately, this thread has become so long that folks just now coming into the discussion have probably gotten an overly simplistic view of the situation.

In the other thread I created, I thanked those who have been using a semicolon when appropriate. If expressions of gratitude to mappers are problematic, then let me replace it with a profound apology for being grateful.

@woodpeck

I would also appreciate if you could recognize that while there might be
renderers who have “not chosen to interpret a semicolon as a delimiter”,
most renderers will have “chosen to not interpret a semicolon as a
delimiter”.

You’re right that some may have made this choice. You must know much more about renderer developers’ intentions than I do; I had no idea most have considered and rejected the idea of pretty-printing semicolons.

Incidentally, there’s a new localized renderer on the scene, Tracestrack, which I just found out about from weeklyOSM. Their preferred delimiter? The empty string. It works well enough for Hong Kong, which separates Chinese and English names with a space:

https://twitter.com/tracestrack/status/1592246528152076289

Like Americana, they render the whole world. I can’t get it to show the English name of Milan, but on the bright side, Milano is an English name that happens to be my favorite snack.

The thought process that inevitably leads to this point is:

1. Users want to see a map in a language they know. OSM has lots of name:* tags for this purpose, so we’ll show those instead of name.
2. For things like cities, users also want to know the name in the local language, so we’ll get it from name. (And default_language would be a nonstarter, if for no other reason than the potential for massive vandalism.)
3. Yuck, repeated names all over the place. Deduplicate the names by searching for the preferred-language name in name.

Americana took an additional step in avoiding false positives by requiring the matching duplicate name to be surrounded by semicolons (but not ;;) before removing it from the label. Unfortunately, “Americana avoids false positives” didn’t occur to me as a subject line last night.