Comments on: Quick Question on Tagging

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:08:00 +0000

Chronicle uses commas and it seems to make sense to me. Hang-over from the seldom-used email Keywords header, perhaps?

By: Jeremy Gould

Jeremy Gould — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:32:53 +0000

Like commas best

By: Steve Dale

Steve Dale — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:20:15 +0000

I think you know my views, given that I’ve spec’d the next phase development of the IDeA CoP platform to use comma delimitted tagging. Interesting to see other comments though.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:04:28 +0000

Thanks dp and Paul. Seems the consensus so far is in favour of commas.

By: Paul Thewlis

Paul Thewlis — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:03:24 +0000

I prefer commas. I don’t like having to make compound tags (e.g. dataportability, socialmedia) in del.ico.us. Commas involve less typing than the quotes marks + spaces approach.

By: dp

dp — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:14:53 +0000

Commas. Spaces are a quasi-delimiter, not sufficiently distinct. Apostrophes and quote marks are functionally adequate, but commas are easier to use.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:00:34 +0000

Yeah, consistency is the thing. I like comma-separated too, but I guess it could mean tags becoming unwieldy and too long.

The thing with the space-separated ones, like del.icio.us is that there is then no real convention for multi-word tags – do you just take the spaces out likethisforinstance or do as some people do and use +, – or _ between words. If people aren’t consistent then the whole point of the tags is lost.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:57:19 +0000

I’m not bothered, maybe leaning a little towards the WP version.

A bit of concistancy would be nice though, and would certainly help tagging become easier to understand for some people.