What's Wrong with Commas Anyway

This is a question that has gnawed at my soul for months. I’ve sent e-mails to a variety of prominent people who could answer the question, but I haven’t received any responses. Maybe they think I’m a nut.In any case, I now present this as an open question to the public:

What’s Wrong with Commas, Anyway?

“folksonomy” is a hot buzzword referring to a way of organizing data according to keywords entered by individual users/authors. The two most prominent examples of sites using this kind of keyword “tagging” system are Del.icio.us and Flickr (both of which are wonderful sites).

Unfortunately, these two trendsetting sites both use the same bizarre method of entering tags: You type your keywords, separated by spaces.

I recently took a photo at the “Design Eye for the Idea Guy” panel at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, which might have some of the following tags:

• SXSW Interactive 2005
• Design Eye
• Cameron Moll
• Ryan Sims
• Web Design
• etc.

Unfortunately, Flickr and Del.icio.us both encourage the use of spaces as tag separators, meaning that you’ve got to either leave out the spaces within each tag, or replace them with some arbitrary symbol (+, -, _, etc.)

For example:

sxsw+interactive+2005 designeye, cameron_moll ryan-sims webdesign etc.

As you might well imagine, this creates some problems:

• Less-savvy users may simply leave the spaces in their tags, unintentionally causing them to be categorized into individual tags like “sims” and “interactive.”
• If you wanted to find pictures of Cameron “Sexiest Man in Web Design” Moll, you’d have to search for cameronmoll, cameron_moll, cameron+moll, cameron-moll, and a variety of other things. No single convention has been developed for dealing with these situations, and even if there were one, enforcing it goes against the fundamental concept of a folksonomy (that it’s intuitive and made up by individual users).
• Programmers and developers are accustomed to oddball text separators, but the general public isn’t. As these services become increasingly widespread, more people are going to be puzzled about the odd symbols in the middle of otherwise logical phrases.
• It makes future search engine parsing more difficult. I could search for “SXSW Interactive 2005” and never find content tagged as “sxsw_interactive_2005” due to the differing ways in which search engines parse punctuation and white space.

This situation is anything but hopeless, though. In fact, there’s a preposterously simple solution: use commas instead.

For example, the tags could be entered as follows:

sxsw interactive 2005, design eye, cameron moll, ryan sims, web design, etc.

The benefits are pretty obvious:

• Separating list items with commas is a basic feature of most world languages, and would be as intuitive (or more so) than separating them with spaces.
• It allows for multi-word tags to be entered with ease.
• It prevents tag variations that differ only in punctuation, allowing similar items to be grouped together as intended.
• It preserves the natural language format of the tag, allowing it to be searched for easily.

So what’s wrong with commas? Why have the major sites adopted spaces as separators, setting the standard that other sites will imitate? Is there any way to turn this trend around? Or are spaces the only logical choice and I’m just missing the obvious reason why commas won’t work?

I leave the question to you. If you think you’ve got a great answer, please let me know, or just post it on your own site and I’ll catch you in the referrer logs.