Mapserver 5 - Terminology clean-up

[Havard Tveite]

Dear mapserver developers,

When moving to a new major version, one should take the
opportunity to do some cleaning up of the terminology
used in Mapserver.

I have found two serious terminology "lapses" in
Mapserver.  There may be more.

1) MAXSCALE / MINSCALE (LABELMAXSCALE / LABELMINSCALE

    1:100000 is a smaller scale than 1:1000!
    In Mapserver, however, MAXSCALE/MINSCALE terminology,
    1:100000 is a larger scale than 1:1000.

    Proposed remedy:
    Change MAXSCALE / MINSCALE to
    MAXSCALE_DENOMINATOR / MINSCALE_DENOMINATOR
    (the same should be done for LABELMAXSCALE/LABELMINSCALE)

    By keeping the old keyword as a suffix of the new, old
    map files could still parse (truncation flexibility).
    I have previously comment on this on
    http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/mapfile/layer (2005-07-19 04:17

2) TRANSPARENCY (layer)
    This keyword has the opposite meaning of what one would
    expect.
    I site from the documentation:
    "TRANSPARENCY [integer|alpha]
    ... Although this parameter is named "transparency", the
    integer values actually parameterize layer opacity. A value
    of 100 is opaque and 0 is fully transparent."

    Proposed change:
    Introduce a new keyword OPACITY and "mark" the TRANSPARENCY
    keyword as deprecated (with a link to OPACITY).
    Old map files could still parse by keeping TRANSPARENCY as an
    "alias" for OPACITY.


By the way... Thank you for your tremendous effort in making
Mapserver the excellent peace of web mapping software it is
today!!

-- 
Håvard Tveite
Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology, UMB
Drøbakveien 14, POBox 5003, N-1432 Ås, NORWAY
Phone: +47 64965483 Fax: +47 64965401 http://www.umb.no/imt