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Can you give some examples of this? Would this be an emulation layer to support classical hierarchies or something else entirely? Academically, I've seen some r
by barik 14y ago
Can you give some examples of this? Would this be an emulation layer to support classical hierarchies or something else entirely? Academically, I've seen some research in this area from file systems researchers and it certainly has not been a trivial problem for them, particularly due to nuances that emerge like cycles in graphs (maybe? I know there is some data structure oddities, though I'm certain what they are), labeling, and when requirements like backwards-compatibility get thrown into the mix.
It's often said that the devil is in the details. Simply saying, "Tags subsume folders in the UI" likely has many cascading implications and edge cases.
- jessriedel 14y agoTrivially, you can replace folders with a certain class of tags for which you enforce the folder hierarchy rules. That is, tags of this type are organized in a folder-like hierarchy, and if you want to apply a tag to a file, all the tags above it in the hierarchy are automatically also added to the file. In this way, you could have multiple parallel folder hierarchies if you really wanted to. But this is obviously messy if you don't do it right. I agree that implementing tags in a way that completely replicates the abilities of folders without burdening the user is non-trivial.