Interesting Links for 05-10-2021
Oct. 5th, 2021 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- UK's largest long-term saving/pensions provider plans to cut their investments in carbon.
- (tags:co2 globalwarming investment uk finance pensions )
- All because you 'trigger' Article 16 that does not make it a gun
- (tags:law trade uk europe )
- Farmer Born in 1842 Talks About Life and Change (Filmed in 1929)
- (tags:history life video )
- Drones raining from the sky in China
- (tags:China drones fail )
- Kids who grew up with search engines don't understand folders
- (tags:Technology metaphor ux Education computers viaSupergee )
- France threatens to use energy supply to 'put pressure' on UK to comply with Brexit deal
- (tags:france uk europe trade )
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Date: 2021-10-06 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 07:47 am (UTC)directories and search
Date: 2021-10-11 03:06 am (UTC)I know someone who manages the documentation team at a software company who frequently poo-poos team members' desires to improve the organizational structure of a large online doc set, because "people will search; they don't use navigation". That's appalling. Yes, support search, but structure conveys meaning, and it seems remarkably short-sighted to try to take that meaning away.
The person with 50,000 files on the desktop who doesn't understand directories will be able to find a specific file with search (probably) -- and will be utterly unable to see the dozen closely-related files that would be interesting and relevant, if only you knew.
People who rely on search are assuming good memory and perfect content, but as soon as one document uses a different word for that concept, you're out of luck.
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-14 02:17 pm (UTC)Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-17 05:36 pm (UTC)I dunno -- while I understand where you're coming from, it comes close to "blaming the user", which is the original sin from the UX viewpoint. If people don't think that way, it's the wrong approach.
And really, directories suck. Search entirely aside, hierarchical but non-exclusive tags are strictly superior in almost every way. (I will give Google props for figuring that out in Gmail.)
So while there are sometimes technical reasons for directories, I suspect their time has passed as a user-facing metaphor -- search and tagging are usually better.
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-17 06:35 pm (UTC)Tags are far superior to hierarchy, yes, because hierarchy is inherently single-path. (Ironically, I added tags to the emacs-based mailer I was using at the time in the mid-80s for exactly that reason: I needed to be able to apply more than one tag to a message.) But until operating systems catch up and give us a lightweight and portable way to tag files, directories are what we have. (It does me no good at all if MacOS has "labels" -- not sure if those work like tags -- if those labels won't follow the file to Linux or Windows.)
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-17 06:41 pm (UTC)So you probably need a unique filename/path as well as a path. Although you could effectively just give each a file a GUID if you really wanted.
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-17 06:46 pm (UTC)I just had this problem with the blog software I'm setting up: URLs were all of the form "blog/entry-title", but I wanted "blog/2021/entry-title" or even "blog/2021/10/entry-title" because, you know, I might want to talk about Yom Kippur in more than one year and I might reach for the obvious name. Without hierarchy I'd have to add temporal tagging, so that an entry might be tagged "Judaism" and "2021" and the combination of all tags + file name would need to be unique. I think I would find that hard to manage if I couldn't actually use hierarchy for the temporal axis, but maybe I'd get used to it. (I did sort out my URL problem.)
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-19 09:14 am (UTC)URLs on DW obviously use the unique ID method (albeit one which is a constantly rising number). And we can have tags too!
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-18 12:16 am (UTC)Yep. But what I'm getting from this topic is that the OSes probably should be paying attention to this, and making hierarchical tags a first-class concept.
Re: directories and search
Date: 2021-10-18 06:14 am (UTC)Tricky to do well (the file system and network commands would need to support it if it wasn't going to be lost as soon as you moved a file), but useful.