On Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 10:59:37 PM UTC-5, Thomas Passin wrote: > > Andy, thanks for your comments. I will give my reaction to them in a > series of posts, one per item. >
Continuing my reactions to your comments - 4. Unique Identification @andyjim: "I propose YYMMDDHHMMSS as a UID format. I further propose that each section of a zettel use the UID of the zettel, with an added digit as an identifier for that section." Here I will disagree. Based on a lot of experience with my bookmarks system and other experiments with topic maps, I prefer identifiers that convey some information. To the software, they would still be arbitrary. Suppose you end up with a lot of zettel files but without the software. You want to find some notes relating to (Zettel Design Notes"). Wouldn't you rather scan the file listings for file names like "zet-design-1", "zet-design-2", and so forth, compared with "2020031412034522"? I would. And they are much easier to type, too It's true that the software can display a list of titles no matter what the identifiers are, and it's also true that computer-generated identifiers are easier to guarantee that they are unique (sorry for the awkward sentence structure there!). But my thinking here is dominated by the desire to have a system that can be transported to other software or, in the last resort, still be useful manually. After all, we're talking about possibly years of work stored in the zettelkasten. It *has* to remain usable. Also, if I were typing a note, I wouldn't want to have to type in identifiers that look like that. It's too hard and finicky. My concept at this point is that the user types in an optional ID and an optional title. If he doesn't include an ID, the system tries to make one from the title. If there were no title, the system would make an id from the first line of the text of the zettel. If somehow the zettel had been filed without any text - maybe as a placeholder to be revisited later - then the system would make up an arbitrary ID, possibly exactly what you suggest. The zettel would still contain the time, just not as the ID. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/c90a7904-88c6-46ca-bb66-6ba29f074c9f%40googlegroups.com.
