If tags use a comma or space

Question

What is your opinion on whether a tag user interface widget should require a comma or spaces as a separator? For example, spaces are used on this site, which requires verbose tags to use a hyphen. I suggested that this was an offer from Joel; but then I realized that Facebook and Wordpress use commas.

And what should it be? Or is it not a big deal? Suppose that users of this widget are usually computer literate, but not terrible.

Answer 1

I would try to think about a tag domain and find out what is the likelihood that potential tags will contain spaces.

For example, most of the things on this site are one word or acronyms, so it’s easy to use spaces.

On the other hand, when marking Facebook, for example, the middle tag is something like "spring break", "frat party", "random hookup", "secretary of state" , etc. Thus, dealing with spatial interpretation or with quotation marks is more complicated, so commas make more sense.

I am not familiar with a certain rule.

If you are thinking about tag clouds, spaces make sense.

Answer 2

, . , , ? , :

foo bar "hello world"
foo, bar, hello world

.

, :

hello world

, , .

Answer 3

. . , . (, , - , "u" gui "" )

Answer 4

I would go for a comma, since it’s more natural to separate multiple word tags with commas, and then use hyphens or other less used replacement methods

Answer 5

I do not think this is important. I think that for a programming site, most of your tags will not be verbose, so it will use a space separator. But I think that you could make a very convincing argument anyway, and it really comes down to personal choices.