[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Categories instead of hierarchies? (was: can pmwiki handle hierarchical content?)

[chr@home.se]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> > I'm scared of PmWiki going hierarchical; I think it will add a lot of
> > complexity for not much gain *unique to hierarchies*.  
> 
> In case it's not been made clear: I don't have any plans to make
> PmWiki hierarchical by default anytime soon.

I have to go to bed soon (well, now), and have only skimmed some of the 
posts in this topic. Anyway, I noticed the statement above and felt I 
had to point out that PmWiki *is* hierarchical.
	Pages are organized in one-level group hierarchy.

The effect of a page belonging to a specific "group" includes:
* Easy to link to other pages in the group
* Each group is a single "namespace" for pages
* Pages in a group share common attributes

Now, I wouldn't mind having all the pages in a big "pile", and a separate
mechanism for making a set of pages share attributes. As long as several
pages can have the same "name"... but what do we mean by name?

We could define name as the last component in a URI like:
	http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/FAQs

Another way would be to say that "name" is the thing displayed on top of a 
page... but these days we have (:title:) for that...

Maybe a better term would be "handle" or "id", i.e. something that
uniquely identifies a specific wiki page. (This might go down the drain if
we do pages with "dynamic" content, for instance using include- and
if-statements).

Well, it seems I'm starting to ramble so I'll try to finish. I think:

* We should try to have meaningful URIs

This does not mean they *have* to correspond to a hierarchy (one-level or
multi-level).

/Christian

PS. I much like the approach Opera's M2 mail application takes to 
organizing your mail.

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