Hall of Bright Carvings

I was asked yesterday to provide a clear, simple explanation of tags; what they are and why we’re using them?

So what are they?

Tags are labels that categorise data and information.

And?

No, that’s it. There’s nothing confusing about them, you don’t have to overanalyse it, that’s literally all there is to them. They’re just a bunch of adjectives that can be attached to any noun.

So why do we use them?

So, we use tags because we’re lazy.

What?

Yeah, ‘fraid so. You’ve totally got the world’s largest pack of slackers working for you. We use tags because they’re the simplest solution for implementing the broadest range of functionality and features without locking developers into a single specific methodology.

That doesn’t sound very lazy, that just sounds like a bunch of confusing buzzwords.

Well, it’s going to sound pretty grey and confusing because we’re dealing with grey and confusing information. When I said that they’re a bunch of adjectives that can be attached to any noun I meant exactly that – they’re a system by which you can categorise anything with anything.
See, here’s the problem: tech people like clear and well defined concepts. The more clearly and well-defined a problem is the more specific and targeted solution we can provide, but the corollary to that is that the more targeted and specific a solution is the harder it is to come along at a later date and shoehorn that solution into fixing a separate problem it wasn’t initially designed to fix. When developing a CMS that’s supposed to appeal to as broad a range of clientele as possible you kind of want to avoid the targeted solution in favour of a broader brush.

Ok, that kind of makes sense, but what has that got to do with tags?

Tags are the broader brush. Tags are a developers first line of defence to a lot of problems. Some clients  just want a simple way of putting keywords into HTML metadata – we can just use the tags associated with a Page to do that. Some clients want a simple way of searching across a wide range of pages, events and news articles – again, tagging gives us the hooks needed for getting that data to the user. There’s no arbitrary number limitation on tags and they can be attached to just about everything with minimal effort. You can even use them to represent large amounts of information in new ways of navigation (see tag cloud).

But it’s so airy-fairy.  Tags don’t exist until the user adds them in, and they’re only as good as the client makes them? We’re not providing them a solution, we’re making them do more work.

Well, I did say we’re lazy. More to the point though, any system is only as good as the information put into it. Some clients may feel comfortable allowing content creators to tag their information any way they please, meaning that some tags get misspelt or duplicated as singular and plural. Some clients may feel more comfortable writing strict content guidelines for their content editors defining what tags may or may not be used. It’s important to recognise though that in this regard tags are in no way different to any other form of content; clients have to make the same decisions about page titles and page content and every other piece of information that gets added to their site.

Hmm, alright, I can understand that. Anything else you can tell me about tags?

That’s about it really. The important thing to realise is that they’re not the solution to every problem, nor are they a perfect solution, but they are a solution that doesn’t get in our way when we do want to implement a better solution for a specific client while at the same time giving every client a kind of base functionality that most of them will find useful.

Holy crap. Tags are bloody awesome.

Why yes, yes they are. I’m glad we had this conversation.