Tag Systems • Buttondown
I’ve tried to write a blog post on tag systems for years now. Literally years, I think I first started drafting it out in 2018 or so? The problem is that there’s just so much to them, so many different approaches and models and concerns that trying to be comprehensive and rigorous is an exercise in madness.
So screw it. These are my noncomprehensive, poorly-researched thoughts on tag systems, thrown on the newsletter. This is not about implementation of tag systems, just their design.
A tag is a metadata label associated with content. The tag name is also the id: two tags with the same name are the same tag. Tags appear in almost all large systems:
Tags are primarily used for both querying, or discovering information based on tags, and grouping, or organizing content for processing. They are sometimes also used for business logic, like “all articles tagged covid are free even without a subscription” or “devs can upload to any s3 bucket with the qa tag”.
Tags are primarily client-driven. You do not need to make changes to the codebase to add or a remove a tag. This is in contrast with the content structure, which requires dev intervention to change.
