I think we may be discussing this from the wrong angle. I don't think
that anyone is arguing that there isn't any value in tag phrases and I
find it hard to believe that under ideal conditions anyone would prefer
to use radio_astronomy, radio-astronomy, or radioastronomy instead of
"radio astronomy" when managing tags. So I think we can go ahead and
agree that it's nice to be able to tag things with phrases.
To me, the real issue is how to do that. So far the 2 schools of
thought are ...
1. indicate phrases by replacing spaces in phrases with other
characters, like hyphens or underscores.
2. to allow users to group words into phrases using quotes.
In my mind, #1 is the better option because it's the simplest. Does it
deliberately convolute the language to make the technology easier? yes,
and that's a shame, but at the end of the day I still think it's the
best option for users. I don't doubt that anyone on this list could use
#2 without any problems and would get better use out of it, but we are
not designing this tool for engineers, we are designing it for the
simplest users.
So, consider for example, if you had to explain how to enter tags to
your parents or some other very non-technical people. I think it's far
easier to explain #1 and simply say "enter any tags you want, separated
by spaces. if you have multi word tags then use underscores to join the
words." rather than trying to instruct them on how to group phrases with
quotes and then creating a way for them to actually mess up the process
if they did something like this ... 'tag1 tag2 "tag phrase' and forgot
the end quote.
I think we should also consider the actual occurrence of phrase tags.
If phrase tags only represent 1/10 of 1% of all tags being entered then
why are we trying to convolute the interface to support such a small
portion of the usage scenario? My guess is that phrase tags would not
represent a large portion of the tags entered by users and so making
special rules to handle them doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I also think it also makes sense to consider whether or not using
radio_astronomy or radio-astronomy has any truly negative side effects
aside from looking a little odd. If most people can read it fine and
most search engines will interpret hyphenated words as phrases then
maybe there is little downside to this approach.
-- Allen
Jeffrey Blattman wrote:
+1
Craig L Russell wrote:
Bottom line, I think that there is value in tag "radio astronomy"
which is more than the sum of "radio" and "astronomy".
