While I’m not sure if this is exactly the right tag to create, (maybe a general text processing tag, or internationalization?) articles about Unicode and UTF-8 are very popular. I recently submitted a post about Unicode and it was hard to find a fitting tag for it. A search for stories about Unicode gives me ~291 results.
Can we make it a bit broader, like typography or something encompassing all of that?
“(character) encodings”? I think of typography as something entirely different.
Yeah, I think typography is more about displaying fonts and typesetting stuff, encodings are different.
For
typography, what’d be in scope? Fonts, character encodings, typesetting? (like TeX)I think this is a great idea. Heck, it would encourage me to post about more weird corners of unicode, like Issac Newton’s personal alchemy symbols which made it in somehow.
Definitely looking forward to reading an article on that, tag or not. :)
textmaybe?What was the submission you are thinking of? Also, what are some other Unicode articles you think would’ve benefitted?
Boldly going meta meta for a bit: I wonder if free form tags would be a nicer feature for us to have than having to stick with individual tag requests. For lobste.rs I do have faith that the userbase will be able to handle such a feature with care, and combined with the ‘suggest’ feature I believe this could work, strength-in-numbers wise and perhaps only being available to people who have submitted x stories or, gasp, have a certain level of karma.
I’ll admit straight up I’m being playfully cheeky here: fostering hope that we could get a console tag for console/terminal applications, I made a suggest/request post for this a good while ago, but it didn’t happen and faded from view. But I still want it, so I hope I can get away with suggesting someone set up us the tags!
I personally feel that the discussion on these tag request threads is, itself, valuable. In the short term, it lets us talk through what the people here actually want, and I think a conversation is always preferable to a faceless vote (except in dysfunctional situations, like actual politics :)). In the long term, it’s also useful to have the old threads to answer questions about how things got to be this way and whether the rationale still applies.
I also dislike the idea of gating anything at all on karma, but from your feigned shock, I’m pretty sure you already knew that, and why. :) It’s still a fair suggestion, but I would personally prefer that any free-form tag feature not be gated on game mechanics.
Free-form tagging is a bad idea.
Tags represent a taxonomy for classifying submissions, and having to go through the relative rigor of “can we have x tag?” threads helps make sure that a) we adopt tags that everyone understands and b) educate people as to how a tag has come to exist.