stop rendering highway=path in way that implies that it is for low quality footways

[mkoniecz]

highway=path is not supposed to imply that quality/importance is low or that its legal status is less clear than highway=footway (see ​http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:highway%3Dpath&oldid=1202651 )

Despite this many people has opinions like that and use it during tagging (and criteria for this opinions wary depending on person and are not consistent).

Maybe it would be better to stop rendering highway=path in way that implies that it is worse highway=footway (dashed vs not dashed). Maybe it would be better to rather show quality of surface (based on surface tag).

Related: ​https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1698 and ​https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1713

[openstreetmap.org-user-d1g]

Support that there shouldn't be distinction. path/footway wasn't the best way to tag objects and many users use what was available.

We should tag surface/tracktype instead of path/footway distinction. I prefer single tag (say, hw=footway) as mapper and for other developers. Very clear explanation why? by gravitystorm is here: ​1 ​2.

Personally I use path/footway only because I have no time to enter every detail of the surface or I wasn't able to collect all data during observations.

There huge difference between surface=sand and surface=unpaved for cyclists. Please add support for surface=sand before you add support for paths in your software.

I would never tag 50km of "surface=unpaved" (paths/trails/roads) just to skip surface=sand segment that will ruin your race/ride.
Same about smoothness=terrible surface=mud/dirt - it is more informative than highway=path.

[skyper]

A highway=footway is always a highway=path + foot=designated which are rendered the same way in plain JOSM.

surface=* is very useful but for both cases and plain JOSM does not render it at all so far.

[Klumbumbus]

If we render highway=path like highway=footway we loose some visual information for the users. One goal of the internal mappaint style is to show what is actually tagged. Of cause not all tags, that would create a mess, but the "important"/"main" tags.
If a way is tagged as highway=path or highway=footway seems important to me as they have a sligthly different meaning.

surface=* is a typical example for a specialized mappaint style where we already have two: wiki:/Styles/Surface and wiki:/Styles/Surface-DataEntry