[Pmwiki-users] Re: Categories instead of hierarchies?

[chr@home.se]

On 26 Oct 2004, John Rankin wrote:

> Time for a summary. Here's where I think we have reached.
> 
> 1. categories are useful and cool

Agreed

> 2. by default, category pages go in the Category group
>    or your local language equivalent

Not to be picky, but doesn't a "category page" by definition belong to the
category of category pages? So we should have a page Category.Categories
as well?  (And should this page refer to itself ;-)

> 3. no changes to PmWiki are needed -- just put
> 
>     [[Category/XYZ]]
> 
>   on the page
>
> 4. do we want a special markup for categories?

Regarding items 3 and 4:

Even if no changes are strictly necessary, this is a new paradigm for
PmWiki, so I see nothing wrong with adding markup etc for it.  
*Especially* if that makes the concept easier to understand and use.

As an example of special markup, I can see the need for something that 
creates a list of all the categories a page belongs to (i.e. creates a 
list with links to the corresponding category pages).

Furthermore, I think that from a logical point of view the action of
saying that "this page belongs to category XYZ" should really be a
directive. Or at least be available as a directive.

I would also like the possibility to logically separate between:
* Adding a page (ie marking it as belonging) to a category
* Inserting a link to a category page

For instance, let's say that we want to put a link to the category page
at the top of a page as well as at the bottom of page. Let's say we did
this by inserting

	Categories: [[Category/XYZ]]

at the top of the page and at the bottom of the page. We have now marked
this page as belonging to XYZ twice...  so if we want to change the
category we have to make the adjustment in several places.

> 5. if so the choices are:

I think it's a bit too soon to make "permanent" decision on this. What I'd
like is the ability to try out some simple implementation and see where it
takes us. For that purpose, I think using something like [[!XYZ]] to both
mark a page as belonging to category XYZ, and rendering a link to the
category page would work well.

> Action
> ======

oops -- maybe I should have read all of it before I replied...

/Christian

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