[pmwiki-users] Proposal 2: Virtual Hierarchical Groups

Dominique Faure dominique.faure at gmail.com
Wed Oct 18 09:11:51 CDT 2006


On 10/18/06, The Editor <editor at fast.st> wrote:
[...]
>
> I know Categories are already hierarchical
[...]

Before all, I want to point out that by any means, categories *are
not* already hierarchical.
You may more describe them as "facets" under which a page could be
considered [my english is a bit short here, but the concept is not so
hard to see ;)].
Since Categories are pages by themselves, they could also be
categorized, which is the classic way to build hierarchies of
categories.
The major drawback there, is that categories couldn't always be
conceptually organized as hierarchy trees, ie. this is the
pebble-in-the-shoe of all object oriented programing language
designer.
As an example, we (the mailing-list recipients) can almost be all
categorized as PmWikiUser(s), and this category may also be subdivised
as WikiPageWriter(s) and RecipeDeveloper(s):

PmWikiUser
 +- WikiPageWriter
 +- RecipeDeveloper

Then, how would you categorize your wiki profile page,
[[!WikiPageWriter]],  [[!RecipeDeveloper]] or *both* ?
In the third case, you'll results in something similar as what is
called a diamond inheritance scheme in OO programing:

         Category.PmWikiUser
             /       \
C.WikiPageWriter C.RecipeDeveloper
             \        /
           Profile.Caveman

So, how would I choose which parent attribute's value propagate to the
leaf node of this acyclic graph?

Dom




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