Rules are meant to be broken
I just want add a little something because I think there can be a lack of subtlety when dealing with such broad subjects especially when they seem to relate to standards or guidance. The subtlety is there are multiple perspectives here;
- A user designer or developer using a tiddly wiki for themselves
- The same for a small local self supported audience
- Publishing to a broader internet audience
- Publishing to the tiddlywiki community solutions they can incorporate in their own wikis for any of the above purposes.
The reason I need to state this is because I dwell mostly in the last perspective and in many ways this is what talk.tiddlywiki.org is all about. Empowering members of the community to build simple to complex solutions.
The thing is if I publish methods, solutions and editions into the community for their reuse, if we choose to retain totally Laissez-faire tiddler naming standards the quality and reusability of what we publish will deteriorate. If I make a complex solution with little or no standards it will be hard to maintain and will cause a lot of unnecessary community activity and support needs.
So the point is we are all free to do what ever we want in tiddler naming standards but as soon as you start to make something publicly available, or you start to make claims, or encourage someone to make use, of new responsibilities arise. Be it personal or professional when we make things public or make claims to others we have obligations that match or exceed our rights.
So given these different perspectives, I believe we need to have well developed standards as guidance (no in any way enforced) that we can refer to when needed. This guidance can be developed by enthusiasts with a broad skills and deep interest and builds a resources for others to use without having to dig deep into the pros and cons of different approaches. Rules are meant to be broken but its nice to have good ones no one needs to break, so where ever you look the rules result in consistency.
Examples of breaking rules I see value with, in some cases
- Actually naming tiddlers using prose in a wiki for building content from reusable content eg; advertising copy
- Using tiddler names as fieldnames TiddlyWiki 5.2.0 prerelease discussion
- Using Alternate Unicode alphabets for the readability of “system type” tiddlers but stay out of the standard search where users dwell.
In fact there is strong evidence that the development of standards has enabled out societies to achieve most of out successes from landing on the moon to the internet and smartphones (effectively computers in a pocket). I for one want tiddlywiki to succeed to “democratise software”, and it should be replete with optional but effective guidance/standards.
There are also parallels with art, creativity, the use of “Creative limitation” or “constraints” and standing on the shoulders of giant’s.