[sugar] Ideas for Journal: How epiphany browser manages bookmarks just with tags

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <hoboprimate at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/19 C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org>:
>> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <hoboprimate at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you accept that tags can sometimes be ordered, so that a/b is
>> different than b/a (although both will show up on searches for 'a' and
>> 'b'), then this starts looking more and more like a way to view
>> filesystems as well, for those old enough to want to do that.
>
> I don't follow this. Thinking in Journal terms, where currently the
> only access is through the search box, you could search for "olpc
> sugarlabs" to see your "olpc-sugar" e-mails, or "olpc" to see all
> which fit under "olpc", i.e.
> "olpc-fedora"+"olpc-sugarlabs"+"olpc-sugar".
> A search which doesn't work if you follow the containerization way of
> directories, would be if you searched just for "sugarlabs" . This
> would give you "olpc-sugarlabs" results, but also would find
> "sugarlabs" tagged entries which didn't belong to the "olpc-" root
> (like a logo of Sugarlabs, or some document about it).

My example might not have been the best, but independent tags start
having real problems when I have a lot of tags and many of the tags
are duplicated.

Some more examples:
* "jill/joe" might be what jill thinks of joe, while "joe/jill" might
be what joe thinks of jill.
* "techsquares/lists" is email relating to the mailing lists I
maintain for tech-squares, while "lists" contains all my subscription
information for mailing lists I belong to, and "lists/techsquares" is
thus my own mailman login for the techsquares list (which I'm on, as
well as maintain).
* The total list of tags in my gmail instance is very large!  But the
top-level list could be much smaller if I could order them
hierarchically.

> So I agree that some kind of containerization is needed, but not in
> the form of a/b being different than b/a, but by using "virtual
> folders" or "saved searches" which would effectively act as virtual
> folders, with specific tags, search terms, object types, even a period
> of time if you wished.

I think this is a separate functionality.  This lets me take my
'techsquares/lists subscribe-requests' search and turn it into a top
level tag.  Containerization is meant to prevent all tags from
becoming top level.

>> Rather than having two separate views for 'hierarchy' and 'journal',
>> this unifies them so achieve a more consistent and "growable"
>> interface: you don't have to discard everything you know and learn a
>> new metaphor and interface when you start to use 'folders'.
>
> I hope, like I said above, that "virtual folders" or "saved searches"
> (they're the same, just differently named) would replace "static
> folders".

They're complimentary.  If you look at [[Olpcfs]], there's a way to
navigate 'tag space' and even 'search space' as if it were a
directory.  Ordered tags are a way to navigate directory space as if
it were a tag soup.
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )