I read some of the wiki pages for Abandoned/Disused/Life_Cycle tags but it seems there's no answer to how to use these tags. I've been mapping an area around an old canal and could really use some way to distinguish the areas that still have water in them and the areas that have been filled in.

The former is still useful as a landmark and important to know about for navigation purposes unless you're carrying a canoe with you... The latter is only useful for people to understand the landscape (and why there's a footpath there) and for historical purposes.

It seems to me that's the basic distinction. Is the presence of the object important for navigation or useful as a landmark even if not for its original purpose? Or is it just being marked for informational purposes.

I was trying to add layer= attributes to the ramps in this (crazy) highway junction and later went back to check how it rendered and found that osmarender seems to draw the layer=-1 roads strangely when they hit the parkland underneath.

It draws the parkland over the top of the roads -- is that intended? What is the best practice for marking these roads and parkland? The roads are in a trench and the parkland is a whole area which is defined, i believe by law.

In general I suppose part of the question is how should trenches that aren't tunnels be marked. The area of land they're in doesn't cover the roadway, so I would expect it to be rendered like a regular road.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.4689&lon=-73.60218&zoom=17&layers=0B00FTF

Hm, Osmarender seems to have trouble with the coastline here. It gets the land/water bit backwards for a rectangular area.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.4207&lon=-73.8804&zoom=12&layers=0B00FTF

Actually on further examination Osmarender gets a lot of the coastline around Montreal wrong. The whole tip of the island here is underwater including a lot of suburbs :)

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.6674&lon=-73.5117&zoom=13&layers=0B00FTF

Can anyone explain what changeset 1314298 is all about? I do not recall ever editing this road, I've never even been there. Nothing seems out of place about it now but I can't figure out how to view the before and after to see what the changeset actually changed.