Comment 5 for bug 575118

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 7:11 AM, dagurasu <email address hidden> wrote:
... 8< ...
> Here's an idea, what if the tags are just a special type of link?  LIke
> the user is on a page about [[travel]] and inserts a tag for
> [[food:mexican]].  Automatically (not like now) the page
> [tags:food:mexican] is created with a link in it to [[travel]].   For
> that matter just making all links automatically create blank pages(if
> not existing) half solves the problem but still requires the
> uncomfortable use of looking for backlinks.  The only extra bit needed
> is that for some special links recognized as tags.. a forward link gets
> placed in that page and these special links are separated in the side
> view (under tags).  These special links could  be recognized by a
> different markup or simply by [[tags:food:mexican]], where the top level
> "tags" triggers the extra behavior.

The main reason that tags are not yet implemented is that I really
wanted to implement them as special links. However I found there are a
number of subtleties where tags differ from links, which made it hard
to do. And hard things easily get postponed. My current view is that
tags should be more like a property than like a link, they codify
keywords to index the pages, not necessarily relations between pages.
For example when moving a page links need to be updated but tags don't
change. Instead of indexing tags in the same table as links we better
put them in a separate index table. This makes things much easier.

Another objection against using links for tags is that you would have
the discipline to start every tag-link with ":tags:". Notice the
starting ":" which is necessary because you might have a local page
called "tags" as well. This makes is bothersome to type tags like
this. I would prefer a wiki syntax like "@foo" for the tag "foo".
(Some people seem to prefer "#foo", but this may conflict with a
future use of link anchors.)

Regards,

Jaap