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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

> I've been hearing this for years, but I've never had the mental model for it. Maybe I just have to try it out.

Gmail uses tags rather than folders, nice easy way to have a play if you've already got a google account.

Conceptually, I think of it as basically being able to have lots of different hierarchical folder structures applied to a set of objects at the same time. Or to flip it round, a normal folder structure is like using tags but where you are limited to one tag (the folder that holds the object) per object.

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Not exactly. In Gmail, tags are hierarchical.

So, if I have a tag called 'projects', and another tag called 'newproject', the overall tag is 'projects-newproject'.

If I try to see everything under 'projects', it'll only show me the ones tagged 'projects' directly, not the ones under 'newproject'.

I think what you're seeing is the opposite: tags aren't hierarchical. Tags can be organized hierarchically, for organizational purposes, and you can use rules to ensure that everything tagged "projects-FOO" is also tagged "projects", but the tags as they apply to tagged objects aren't hierarchical.

This is only if you use it hierarchically. No one prevents you from having a tag projects and another tag newproject. Your emails just have both tags assigned and you are good to go

From a document perspective, yes, you're correct.

From a tagest perspective, and the discovery affordances, there is a significant difference.

Hierarchical tagsets allow you to navigate via tags, affording document discovery by that mechanism.

That becomes more significant as you're working with a larger, richer, and more structured tagset.

Sure, but GP's point (and it's something that annoyed me in Fastmail too) is that if you do have an 'hierarchical tag' - which could be in addition to unrelated tags - you don't get the '<sub-tag> is a <super-tag>' that you might expect.

The tags themselves end up in an hierarchy without it affecting the tagged contents.

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