[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

Chris Johnson cxjohnson at gmail.com
Tue Nov 20 15:48:52 UTC 2007

On Nov 14, 2007 7:05 PM, Hans Salvisberg <drupal at salvisberg.com> wrote:

> The problem is that everyone intuitively knows what a category is.
> If you have a term "dog" and you tag a post with "dog", then that post goes
> in to the category "dog". That's the common sense non-technical meaning of
> "category". You can even stretch that to include terms like "Gamer's Forum"
> -- a post in the Gamer's Forum goes into the category "Gamer's Forum".
> That's what classification is all about, putting things into categories.
> Using "category" for anything else but for terms will just not work for
> normal people without re-educating them about what that common word means.
> IOW, it will not work.
> Now, what's that thing in between -- the "animals" and the "forums" -- in
> plain English? Go ask the man in the street:
> If you have categories like "dog", "bird", and "elephant", then what would
> you call that group of categories? Answer: "animals"

They may know it intuitively, but at just what level does it apply?

Why would "dog" be the category?  To me, the category (the container)
is "animals" -- and "dog" and "bird" are things, or instances of
things which go into the category "animals".

English is flexible that way -- we are actually both right.  And thus,
we don't know what any particular user is going to think when they see
the word "categories".  Are they going to think animals, plants and
minerals?  Or dogs, birds and elephants?

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