Agylen

I just found out that the “smart” tagging interface I implemented last friday is not so smart after all. It’s actually a bit broken in that it only extracts single words from descriptions before matching them with existing tags. The problem is than tags can be made up of multiple words and no matches with multi-word tags are thus ever found.

Alright, this can be fixed and I will probably work on it tonight, but this made me think about the reasons why del.icio.us tags do not contain any spaces. I still think it’s inconvenient, from a user’s perspective, not to be able to use spaces to separate words within tags and to be forced to use hyphens, underscores or other similarly awkward punctuation marks. But I can understand how easier it is to deal with it form a programmer’s perspective.

Another problem is that it will be impossible to connect OSZone tags to del.icio.us tags without arbitrarily changing blanks into underscores or something like that, before linking.

Anyway, users always come first, so I’ll stick to spaces for now. Changing along the road, if it is necessary, is just a search & replace operation.

I also started thinking about the taxonomy of projects. Until now, we have relied on a simple system of categories that is intended to classify projects according to their main mode of use: libraries that you link in with your code as opposed to frameworks that somehow force your code to adapt and be controlled from the outside, or development tools that you use during development but don’t become part of your program.

I reasoned that tags, the search and the “similar projects” feature would be much more useful than putting projects into a fixed set of non-communicating vases. So I went for the minimum amount of taxonomy that would not get in the way too much. I still think this is a good idea, but I’d like to explore adding another dimension to the classification.

This would be the dimension of “field of application” and its axis would be labeled “web publishing”, “data management”, “XML”, “graphics”, “text manipulation”, … (I’m just picking categories at random here, out of the top of my head). I would never want a hierarchical taxonomy, but probably a set of orthogonal dimensions along which to classify projects would be nice to have. User could choose to navigate along the dimension that they care the most about. Let’s call that faceted navigation (hat tip: the Daisy folks). What do you think?