[Trac] Re: Tags

[Andre Asselin]

Muness Alrubaie wrote:

> They're not completely clear in my head yet, but I am fairly sure that
> applying tagging to wikis gives us ways of organizing things that
> we've not had before.  I think after using it for a while it'll feel a
> lot more intuitive than strict hierarchical organizations.

I started using categories recently, and find them to be a useful 
feature.  In essence, though, what you've created is simply a different 
flavor of a link.  [[TagIt]] creates this new kind of link, and 
[[ListTags]] is the same thing as [[BackLinks]] for the new link.

I think generalizing this would be quite useful.  If, for example, you 
could do something like

	[wiki:<PageName> <LinkFlavor> <Link-description>]

where <LinkFlavor> could be any kind of flavor you want, it would expand 
on the tag idea to allow you to specify any kind of relationship you 
want between the pages.  Today, with the two specialized link tags, you 
only can specify an 'ordinary' link flavor and a 'category' link flavor. 
  By generalizing this function, you can specify exactly how the two 
pages are related.

Similarly, [[BackLinks]] would need to be enhanced to take a parameter 
to specify what flavor of link to list.

One example I can think of where this might be useful is for templates. 
  I have a to-do template that I use to create new todo items.  The todo 
items are categorized under "ToDo".  If I categorize my template under 
ToDo, it will show up on my todo list, even those it shouldn't.  If we 
had this generic link capability, then I could link my to-do template to 
"ToDo" with a link flavor of "template".  Then on ToDo list page, I 
could specify that I only want BackLinks for linktype "category", so 
only my "real" todos would show up.

- Andre Asselin