[Pmwiki-users] Re: Why heirarchy?

Jonathan Scott Duff duff
Tue Oct 19 09:29:40 CDT 2004


On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:41:10AM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> One item of note is that I've only come up with two reasons for 
> needing a hierarchy over PmWiki's current group structure:
> 
> 1.  ...when a group name (e.g, "Hardware") needs to be reused by multiple 
>     groups; i.e., the same group name has different meanings and content 
>     depending on its context. 
> 
> 2.  ...to make an organizational framework more apparent to authors
>     and readers.  

And even these are tenuous at best. #1 is satisfied in the current
pmwiki design by adding a prefix or suffix to differentiate the two
"groups"[1]. And although I removed it, you mentioned how to satisfy
#2 as well: put the structure in the pages rather than the page
names[2].

[1] In reality these probably wouldn't be groups, but rather pages
    within a group (and the group provides the context). For instance,
    Linux.Hardware versus Military.Hardware. If you find that page
    *within* a group needs to be used in 2 places with different
    meanings then the page name is probably too general.

[2] It's a mistake to think of page names (as expressed in URLs) as
    being hierarchical in nature anyway. http://.../foo bears absolutely
    no relation to http://.../foo/bar *except* in the case where there's
    a mapping from URLs to a filesystem (or similar). Granted that's
    a common case, but there's nothing that requires it.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com



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