[uf-discuss] rel-tag for hierarchical and general categories

[Benjamin Carlyle]

On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 10:38 +0100, Andreas Haugstrup wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Dec 2005 08:03:06 +0100, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com>  
> wrote:
> > Note that dot ('.') makes a decent hierarchy marker with no required  
> > change for flat tag systems.  Foxilicious [1] uses dot as a default  
> > delimiter for converting from the (mostly) flat tag space at del.icio.us  
> > to the hierarchy of Firefox's bookmarks.  So you could do:
> > <a
> > href="http://members.optusnet.com.au/benjamincarlyle/benjamin/blog/ 
> > software.httpsubscription">software/httpsubscription</a>
> > Some parsers will still treat that as a single tag, but others will  
> > treat it as a hierarchy, and even in those systems treating it as a  
> > single tag, I think "software.httpsubscription" suggests a hierarchy to  
> > many humans.
> It won't be cool for those people who use system that don't see the  
> hierarchy. Why not use two links:
> <a  
> href="http://members.optusnet.com.au/benjamincarlyle/benjamin/blog/software">software</a>/<a  
> href="http://members.optusnet.com.au/benjamincarlyle/benjamin/blog/software/httpsubscription">httpsubscription</a>

The reason I don't use two tags is primarily techinical. I'm using
bloxsom for my blogging needs and I get a simple $path varible to work
with. I can't get any further without hacking perl, and that's probably
too high a hurdle for me to jump this weekend.

The hierarchical approach is interesting. Bloxsom starts with a
directory structure populated with *.txt files in order to render its
pages. I could rename my software/httpsubscription directory to
software.httpsubscription, but this would disrupt the hierarchical
categories list in my nav panel. More perl hacking to fix. I guess the
right answer for this approach would be to keep the directory structure
as-is, and give myself another variable to work with. That actually
wouldn't be too much perl hacking.

This leads me to my final(?) issue with this microformat. I currently
categorise all of my posts at the same level, so alongside
software/httpsubscription I have software/general. Obviously this latter
entry should be tagged as software, and removing the general directory
level would solve the tagging problem. This however also produces a
technical issue for me. If I remove that directory level my categories
navigation list would hide these general entries (and the count of them)
at the "software" level. The general entries would not get equal showing
as there would be nowhere to have a look at them separately. I think
this would require extensive perl hacking to fix. Could this problem be
resolved in the microformat?

-- 
Benjamin Carlyle <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>
(who feels some perl hacking may be inevitable...)