Does anyone have experience working with nested tags? I could not find any websites that allow users to have hierarchies in their tags (equivalent to non-mutually exclusive categories). Is it a bad practice in general? If so, why?
Answer
The idea behind tags is the same as the idea behind labels in GMail: the ability to assign multiple tags to a single post/mail/.../item.
The GMail labeling of e-mails was born specifically to counter the need in most e-mail clients to archive an e-mail in a single specific folder which ususally would be part of a hierarchy of folders. So what do you do with an e-mail that belongs both in the folder "advertisments" and in the folder "creditors"?
GMail was the first to solve this using labels: you just assigned both the label "advertisements" and "creditors" to the e-mail and you would be able to find it both when showing all e-mails in the "advertisements" label ("folder") and the "creditors" label/folder.
Some people still want to organise their GMail labels in a hierarchical manner and there is actually a GMail "labs" feature that allows this. But in my opinion it goes against everything for which these labels are intended and were invented.
Similarly, organising tags in a hierarchy goes against the grain. How can a specific document/mail have tags from different branches of the hierarchy tree? Technically not a problem of course, but it just doesn't make any sense (at least not to me).
In many CMS's you will find both tags and categories. Usually you can assign multiple tags, but just one category. And you will find that the categories actually can be organised in a hierarchical manner...
So I would say that the reasons most websites won't allow you to have tag hierarchies is that tags are not intended to be used hierarchically and that if you want to do something in a hierarchical manner you need to use categories (or whatever the website offers by way of a hierarchical organisation system).
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