Categorizing with spaces

Jon Udell's been paying a lot of attention recently to categorizing XHTML elements. Two of his readers suggested that he use the class attribute, delimiting the categories (if necessary) with spaces; this is also valid CSS. I'm in favor of it as well, as it has worked well for me in two other circumstances.

At del.icio.us/crysflame, I keep a notebook of interesting links. Each link has several pieces of metadata; of interest is the tags field. The content of this field is a space-delimited list of categories, so to speak; a blog post about Google's IPO would be assigned "blog business", while a paper about graphing social dynamics would get "science social math". It's worked out very well for me, so far; I can find things easily enough by selecting individual tags, though more complex slices of the data aren't provided.

With the release of iTunes 4.2, a new field was added: grouping. At first, it was thought of as a similar sort of categorization field as the tags field: a space-delimited list of single-word categories. It turns out, however, that Apple has other plans for this field. While this puts somewhat of a damper on efforts to sort through music easily, the comments field can be used instead.

Comments

[Ananna]

Hi!

I'm sorry this is off topic, but you posted a very helpful reply in my comments about making my RSS feeds look presentable and I just wanted to say, "thank you" and tell you how much I appreciate your help. That was really nice of you to take the time to help educate me about why and where and what and do it in such a helpful and friendly manner. I am very grateful.

Thank you so much. May life bless you with delicious treats, naps (and the opportunities to take them) that are always refreshing, cold drinks on a hot day, a warm comfy blanket when you need one the most, and someone near and dear to you love to share them all with.

Love,

Hanna

[Joseph]

When I discovered this in a CSS tutorial a while back, a lightbulb went off.

I think the better way to describe it is not "classifying with spaces," but rather simply to point out that multiple classes can be applied to one entity. The space-delineated way of writing it is just what they decided on--comma-delineated would have been more intuitive.

[Dmitry Yeskin]

Hello!

Yes, I am agree with Joseph - comma-delineated way will be better!