[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Re: can pmwiki handle hierarchical content?

[chr@home.se]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 chr at home.se wrote:
> 
> > IMHO, a group is an abstract grouping of pages, for instance something
> > that defines the scope of a namespace. In other words, there can only be
> > one page called 'A' within a group.
> 
> yup, that's the way i'd look at it.  a group is *not* a page -- it
> *contains* pages.  just like a directory *contains* files, but
> wouldn't *itself* be considered a file within the directory.

It's not necessarily the same. For instance, I didn't say anything about
requiring a page to belong to exactly one group, whereas a file always
resides in exactly one directory. 

> > From that point of view, a group might be considered the children of
> > a page.
> 
> hmmm ... not sure what this is trying to say.

Only that a possible definition of the "current group" could be that it
consists of the current page and its child pages.

> > Anyway, I'm just trying to illustrate that 'group' hasn't really been
> > defined yet. If we for instance decided that a page called 'A' may not
> > have a child page called 'A', then we could define a group as a page
> > together with its child pages.
> 
> as i mentioned, i don't think a group should be considered a page.  it
> should be an abstract identifier (possibly multi-level) that
> *contains* pages (or, possibly, other groups).

I also think that a group is different from a page. However, I don't think
of it as a container. (To me the term container implies certain attributes
and restrictions related to physical objects that I'm not sure I want).

> > I agree that introducing some kind of distance metric is probably a good
> > idea.
> 
> i don't think a distance metric would be of much value since the
> metric itself could change drastically as you decide to move groups to
> other parts of the wiki.

I only meant to use the metric for discussing implemenations and 
theoretical aspects. And of course the metric should change if you move 
pages around?

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr