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

[John Rankin]

On Wednesday, 27 October 2004 11:30 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
>
>> 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 ;-)

Almost, Category.Category is the default home of the Category group,
so (assuming no category nesting) each category contains [[!Category]]
to mark it as belonging to the Category category. If the categories
form a hierarchy, eg Category > Astronomy > Planet then Category.Planet
contains [[!Astronomy]] and Category.Astronomy contains [[!Category]].

Choosing how to organise categories is a non-trivial task, but
fortunately, it's really easy to change your mind if it's not working
for you.

>
>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.

As Patrick says, this is the compelling reason for a separate markup.
Category/XYZ is just a link; [[!XYZ]] is assigning to a category. 
This too needs to be a link, as it's the most common case, hence use
of [[ ... ]] markup.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin