>Hierarchical system, folders are artifacts of the physical world in which a single object, tool, pipe, screw, book cannot be in two places at the same time.
Many think hierarchies come from limits in the physical world but that's not what's happening. Yes, that's some of the cause but does not explain all of it.
The deeper rooted reason is that hierarchies are a convenience to aid the human mind. Even without any limitations of physical shelves, the brain likes to:
- notice the relationships from the general-to-specific and navigate them with spatial cues of dirs parent-->child-->grandchild-->etc
- group related items together -- using spatial cues of moving file icons into a file system folder
The world the the blog essay is working in is the os file system. The various files have to be put somewhere on the file system. Since putting hundreds/thousands of files into a single flat folder is useless, one creates some child subfolders to organize it it in some way.
The tagging system assumes a different mechanism (e.g. a separate "database" of tags which filesystems like Microsoft NTFS and Linux ext4 do not have natively.) This happens above the native filesystem. (Incidentally, by placing a file into a subfolder, the name of that folder and the names of parent folders above it act as an "implied set of tags" for free.)
That said, both hierarchical folders and tags solve different needs. Also, hierarchies simulate/approximate "tags" by "virtual folders" and 1-to-n softlinks. Likewise, tagging can simulate "hierarchies" via compound-multi-word-tags.
Many think hierarchies come from limits in the physical world but that's not what's happening. Yes, that's some of the cause but does not explain all of it.
The deeper rooted reason is that hierarchies are a convenience to aid the human mind. Even without any limitations of physical shelves, the brain likes to:
- notice the relationships from the general-to-specific and navigate them with spatial cues of dirs parent-->child-->grandchild-->etc
- group related items together -- using spatial cues of moving file icons into a file system folder
The world the the blog essay is working in is the os file system. The various files have to be put somewhere on the file system. Since putting hundreds/thousands of files into a single flat folder is useless, one creates some child subfolders to organize it it in some way.
The tagging system assumes a different mechanism (e.g. a separate "database" of tags which filesystems like Microsoft NTFS and Linux ext4 do not have natively.) This happens above the native filesystem. (Incidentally, by placing a file into a subfolder, the name of that folder and the names of parent folders above it act as an "implied set of tags" for free.)
That said, both hierarchical folders and tags solve different needs. Also, hierarchies simulate/approximate "tags" by "virtual folders" and 1-to-n softlinks. Likewise, tagging can simulate "hierarchies" via compound-multi-word-tags.