Adding to kai, tehre’s on top of that the issue of sqkm being essentially a tag-for-the-renderer situation here.

Unlike you I find the combined names a clever solution to this conundrum, which I note your alternative does not actually address otherwise

That being said, borderline situations like this are exactly where a form of tagging for the renderer should really be available…

As to the Pacific Ocean thing, aside from software limitation about maximum size of areas (do these still exist? I thought for water features they didn’t anymore since they were basically moved to a dedicated renderer?) the International Hydrographic Commission has defined specific limits to the oceans, so I really don’t see what prevents the use of those on OSM??

I understand why people do it, but dear god I hate mapped sidewalks, because they get in the way of EVERYTHING ELSE YOU MAP LATER ON.

I’d agree with Cyrtin that using highway areas in this fashion is inappropriate. The very fact that additional tags have to be retroengineered to avoid disrupting routing is proof that this is improper

In the opposite direction, I think it wholly inappropriate to crisscross highway=footway on top of something already tagged as a footway area. It manages to simultaneouly bevisually horrendous and geographically inaccurate.

Sadly, there is no system, not even a de facto one, for mapping extremely broad steps such as those at the southern end of Трг партизана. My personal solution has usually been to use a barrier=steps on either a line or an area. The former can be used like barrier=kerb and works especially well when one or two steps clearly bisect a footway area, the latter is messier as there is no easy way to indicate directionality for areas…

Personally I’m not a huge fan of mapping paved areas between buildings and the road, but this is kind of a rock-and-a-hard-place issue rather than an accuracy one. You see, when those areas are mapped, it becomes increasingly difficult to quickly select the desired feature in iD because all edges are joined and overlapping at all points (thankfully this is no longer an issue with borders, but I’d rather we not start doing relations for everything as a solution!). However, I reserve fear greater amounts of loathing for the practice of mapping sidewalks as footway lines… which is also done here at the same time!

Of course, what really on is that a) no sane tagging scheme can encompass all possibly status designations and level (the USNPS alone has units of over 20 different designations!) and b) these systems were originally drawn for European countries where only the national government can make protection designations whereas, as you point out, federal systems (and even non federal: I believe Brazil has state-level natural parks) can have state-level parks with the same degree of protection as national designations (Germany, Switzerland and the UK do not have, as far as I can tell, any system for designation of conservation/natural areas of any sort at the subnational level.)