January 09, 2006

Tag Entry Syntax

I just twigged a *huge* assumption I'd made with respect to the Social Bookmarking OPML/RSS Feed Generator last night, specifally the format used (by default) to enter tags and tag combinations.

Because I tend to use delicious more than any other social bookmarking system, I'd opted for the delicious tag entry format - single word, space separated tags (the same for specifying multiple users).

But different systems use different tag entry formats, as pointed out by this 37 Signals post on just that subject: Tag formats: Can't we all just get along? - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

I don't know if there is a tagging syntax analysis out there anywhere looking at social bookmarking systems in particular (if you know of one, please add the link as a comment to this post:-), so here's a quick summary for the systems covered by the OPML generator:

  • del.icio.us - single word, space separated, case insensitive;
  • simpy - single word(?), comma separated, case insensitive;
  • Connotea - space or comma separated; multi-word tags enclosed in "quotes";
  • Scuttle - comma separated;
  • CiteULike -

The following compounding (?) structures are also used to join words (and perhaps there are other conventions too? Please add them as a comment...):

  • hyphen: compound-tag
  • underscore: compound_tag
  • perdio/dot: compound.tag
  • simple concatenation: compoundtag
  • Upper Camel Case: CompoundTag
  • lower Camel Case: compoundTag

So - that's something else on the to do list, then - a preference setting for the preferred style of tag entry...

(You can see what I'm working towards, perhaps - a single interface onto a whole variety of social bookmarking systems ;-)

Posted by ajh59 at January 9, 2006 09:02 PM
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