On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 03:11:11PM -0400, Randy W. Sims wrote:
Fergal Daly wrote:
Does META.yaml have a place for keyowrds?
The spec doesn't currently provide for keywords. I do think it would be a good idea, BUT I think it needs to be done in a way to avoid abuse. I'd hate to see META.yml files grow by the kb as authors add every conceivable keyword they can think of and try to manipulate the search.
The search algorithm could pay attention to the first X keywords and ignore the rest. Or at least, it could heavily weight the first few.
I think this is part of how search engines prevent the same kind of above of the meta-tag keyword system. You can put as many keywords as you want into the list, but I think the search engines only really care about the first few.
That seems a reasonable approach to overcoming the abuse problem. There is, however, another advantage to the catagory approach: Searching would likely be more consistent. It would help authors to place their modules so that they can be found with similar modules. It would also help ensure that users looking for a particular type module will get back a result set that is likely to contain all/most of the modules of that type.
I would prefer something like this over the "choosing from the fix list" idea.
Having free-form tags is a feature I like on: http://del.icio.us/ It allows new classifications to spontaneously appear.
I will conceed that there are definate advantages to the keyword approach.
Randy.
