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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

eleanorkonik.com

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Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#171

Post by h0p3 »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #111
willbudd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

I'm not sure of a name, but Tiddlywiki does this. You create hierarchies by having tags by creating an item with the tag as its name which causes all items with said tag to be a child of that item. This has a nice side effect of allowing items to exist in multiple locations (so no unique parent is enforced) while still requiring the graph to be acyclic. It ends up working kind of like hard links for folders/files, bu…

Sir Bimlas' TW5-Locator tool is worth checking out: https://github.com/bimlas/tw5-locator.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#172

Post by willbudd »

jholman wrote: post #169
willbudd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a node in a tree hierarchy any folder can only have one parent folder. Tags of course allow nodes to have any number of parents (aka "associations"). The relationship between arbitrary nodes in a tree can be determined by tracing their common ancestry, but tags don't provide equivalent functionality, unless you strictly define how tags themselves relate to other tags. An obvious way to do so is to prescribe that e…

> Similar to symlinks, but arguably less hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual" location and "linked" location. In other words, similar to hardlinks

Right, yes. True. I should have compared with hardlinks instead.

Minor detail: I intended for different deletion semantics from hardlinks. Whereas hardlinks use reference counting for that (only the last deletion actually deletes); for my purposes, delete anywhere meant delete everywhere.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#173

Post by alpaca128 »

fouc wrote: post #166
alpaca128 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would scale. The nested directory structure could reach a depth equivalent to the number of tags to support all combinations. Meanwhile with symlinks you only need one folder per tag and it can be comfortably used with file browsers.

If there was a limit of 10 tags per file, then the max depth would be 10 folders.

With I'd prefer not to worry about such limits though, with some files that don't allow full-text search it can be useful to have more.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#174

Post by xtiansimon »

onion2k wrote: post #79
bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them! It's not something you can just do once either, because every time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of…

Search works brilliantly for your own notes because you know what you're looking for. You wrote the notes. It fails for problems that you can't describe well though, especially if you don't know the technical jargon to search for. Directories and tags can work for that problem because you can easily see relationships like a hierarchy of folders, or what other tags a tagged item has. Tags and folders also act as a pro…

> “You wrote the notes.”

HA! In my case I wrote my notes, but don’t remember what’s in ‘em. It’s endemic for learning.

folders/tags is a false dichotomy.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#176

Post by em-bee »

zdragnar wrote: post #162
em-bee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure i follow. can you give an example how exclusion works? all i see is that without using symlinks i can have only one folder/tag per item. i can choose to do that with tags too if i want, but i don't see how using folders helps with that other than forcing me to do it.

If you can nest folders, then a thing is all of its parent folders in addition to the folder it is directly contained in. This is the AND relationship, which you don't get with most tagging systems. To highlight exclusion, consider an example- folder Animals with subfolders Cats and Dogs. A thing can be either a cat or a dog, but not both.

but that's just tagging discipline. if i tag an animal with cat and dog, that's obviously wrong. but i don't need folders to help me avoid that mistake.

if an object has five tags, it is all those things. that looks like an AND relationship to me.

the rest is search. if your tagging system only does OR searches, then that's indeed a problem, but of the implementation, not of the concept.

and there is no reason both can't coexist.

one application that i use extensively is kphotalbum. it allows me to organize photos by tags, categories, date, folders and other attributes all at the same time. i can navigate and search photos based on all of those attributes. usually i drill down a folder, and then pick tags from within that folder, or i pick tags at the the top level and then work with the folder structure of the selected images. ironically, kphotoalbum does not do well on OR relationships or exclusion of specific attributes. i often use temporary tags to help me there, which kphotoalbum makes trivially easy to use

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#177

Post by ewuhic »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #126
willbudd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

Forever ago I built something similar for generating canonical urls for SEO from a tag system (and to concentrate "google juice" from linking), though hierarchies were not strictly enforced. "expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies. Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume. I also prevented…

Didn't google punish your site for having duplicate entries under different urls?

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#178

Post by fellowniusmonk »

ewuhic wrote: post #177
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forever ago I built something similar for generating canonical urls for SEO from a tag system (and to concentrate "google juice" from linking), though hierarchies were not strictly enforced. "expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies. Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume. I also prevented…

Didn't google punish your site for having duplicate entries under different urls?

I might not have been clear enough I think. I can clarify further if the below is insufficient.

That was the point of labeling 1 version of any duplicated permutation "canonical", to prevent duplicate content penalties.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#179

Post by brazzy »

EleanorKonik wrote: post #115
brazzy wrote: post #105

> Sometimes people will ask me what I do when I have something that could go into multiple places and the answer has always been pretty simple: if something could conceivably fit in two different folders I need to consolidate my folders. How does that not lead to an end result where you have one folder "everything", and thus no organization at all? There's always edge cases.

I've got over 2k files in my Obsidian vault and haven't had a problem really. I think it depends on how you categorize things? I'm never going to confuse my tax documents with my short fiction, or my character profiles for a fantasy character for my daily notes page.

You'd have to give me more info on what categories you have to come up with examples, but I find it completely unbelievable for that problem not to exist.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#180

Post by whywhywhywhy »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #15
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #8

After the past 5 years or so of experiencing the supposed best "folderless" computing has to offer on iOS and ideologically similar platforms. I've gained huge respect for how beautiful the concept of the folder is.

Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they can't replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items that naturally fall into several categories, like music or books, but not for general file systems.

Yeah tags can imitate them on some level. But what about folder workflows like “I want to copy this whole project across 100+ files exactly so I start changing it without losing anything”

With folders it’s just copy the base folder.

Now I know as devs some of us would suggest version control as the solution but keep in mind with folders my non-technical 70 year old dad can do this action and understand it completely because of the tactility a folder provides.

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