Number one request right now is tags, which has been for quite some time. Which has the slight problem of directly conflicting with how the archive displays work right now. All of the displays on the site take advantage of ASP.NET databinding, which most simply translates as one row of data is one row on the display. When a page of the archive is called up the site goes and gets a set of quotes as rows in a table, each row is one displayed quote consisting of a number of set fields that always exist.

With tags I don't have a set number of fields. I have however many tags as I need to apply to the quote. Which is rather simple to track in the database, but the current display mechanism simply doesn't support it. There are a number of methods I could use to attempt and integrate into the existing display mechanism but it would violate the only worthwhile principle built into the code to do so and create more problems in doing any further modifications later.

That said, in the last four years I've dealt with this kind of problem a number of times elsewhere and have some reasonably solid solutions that could function, if I completely re-write the core mechanisms of the site. At which point I may as well overhaul the entire thing, keeping the handful of things that really do work well and drag the site into some semblance of modern interface design while I'm at it.

Which is pretty much what I plan to do as I snag a few more books on subjects I'm less familiar with than core applications development. Over the next few weeks I'm going to start working out exactly what I can implement in a reasonable time frame and what I can't and lob out questions on just what people are interested in seeing but for today I'm going to start with the details of what people want to see from tags.

Should tags be relatively simple, relating to any aspect of a quote, or should we have sets of tags relevant to who's being quoted and what the quote is about? Beyond that, just what set of tags would be sufficient to cover the quotes as we have them? I've watched what happens with open tag creation, and the merging and hacking of tags that goes on, so I'd much rather have a defined set of them to select from. But too large a set and they're difficult to use, too small a set and they don't cover much.

What are people's opinions on tag handling? What tags would you want to see?