(Nutbush City) Delimiters
December 6th, 2005, By Duncan Gough
Over on the Signal Vs. Noise blog there’s a good discussion about tag delimiters and their implementation.
Obviously, del.icio.us was first and space delimited tagging made sense. However, people’s usage of del.icio.us has proven that compound tagging, where two words are joined together to form one tag, such as match three, is both popular and desirable.
Whilst flickr has quite an ugly way of allowing compound tagging (using double quotes since single quotes would b0rk everything up when it comes to apostrophes), most other sites have found that comma separated tags work well. They allow single and compound tags and are intuitive. As one commenter noted, lots of files are already comma delimited, it’s a native format.
As I noted on the tagschema mailing list a while back, why the strict division between space, comma or newline anyway? Let the application infer meaning. Computers are pretty good at guessing when it comes to a statistical analysis. Which is exactly what we do on MOG. We encourage people to use new-line separated tags as it looks better on the submit a game form whilst also encouraging users to use compound tags. People do still use commas and spaces though, especially if they’re used other tagging sites and in these cases the application knows to break up the tags using the right delimiter.
The Amazon example, something I haven’t yet tried, looks perfect though. Since AJAX is a bit too cutting edge for my tastes, I’ll wait before using that on MOG. Not all casual gamers are going to be comfortable with that kind of interface, especially given that Millionsofgames.com is *still* the only Web 2.0, casual games website out there.