I agree with most of the comments here. Just a few more: Our UI is simply a text box. It all depends on our code to make it resilient to most typos or errors like unclosed/mixed quotes.
This is definitely a small percentage of the tag used so we need not to pontificate on the issue too much and in reality that's why I agreed at least internally to go with #1 and _ since it didn't seem to affect our current taggging implementation negatively. -Elias Allen Gilliland wrote: > 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". >>> >
