It seems like the latest SVN commits to WordPress have added tagging support to the popular open-source blogging platform… and it’s about time, too! It’s no longer stuff you have to add by plugin, so WordPress is finally getting with the times and adding this much-requested functionality to the upcoming WordPress 2.2 (due to be released April 22, 2007). See for yourself:
Web 2.0, blogging, and tags all go together, hand-in-hand. However, while RPC standards exist for blogs and the pinheads boggle over the true definition of a “blog,” no one has a cast-in-iron standard for tags. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the internet — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they’re not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.
To Space or Not to Space, that is the Question
This one is probably the most obvious obstacle and the most destructive when it comes to tallying tag popularity or making those pretty tag clouds: Can tags have spaces in them or not?! If tags don’t/shouldn’t have spaces, then what do you do with multi-word tags that you just can’t shorten? Do you replace the spaces with underscores, dashes, or just take ’em out? Does it matter?