Compound Titles

[TW_Tones]

Reflecting on your reply @Scott_Sauyet let me restate this;

I have argued against the use of “compound titles” when the information in the title is not available elsewhere.

• Otherwise to make use of the information in the title, you first need to deconstruct the title.

@Scott_Sauyet

I have a strong use-case for this style: large hierarchies, with possibly conflicting names.

@Scott_Sauyet thanks for sharing your use case, I don’t doubt there are cases where it may be useful to use compound tiddler titles, at least pragmatically. Your example maybe one, although as others have considered, having a simple numeric key with other fields being used to show a “compound caption” rather than key are plausible options.

@TW_Tones

I have argued against the use of “compound titles”

This rule is not so much for use cases like yours, but new and regular users (I was included in this cohort once) actually have a habit of moving to compound tiddlers very quickly when it is not advisable.

• As a long term contributor I have found myself several times helping people write solutions to list tiddlers according to information only available in a compound tiddler title.
• This is why I have restated the argument at the top of this reply.

@Scott_Sauyet

many Categories, as well as some small metadata. A Category can have many Rules as well as some significant metadata…

• I expect we could discuss this further in Knowledge, Information or network Science terms and about the nature of the data that may push one towards compound titles.
  • This raises an idea in my mind about sparse or convergent relationships in a data set.
• However if the different data that is used to make up a compound tiddler title, still remains accessible in its own right, then there is an argument the title is not so much compound, but just a unique value generated from combinations of values.

Sometimes it may be hard to tell the difference between a “compound key” and a “unique title” made up of compound values.

@CodaCoder

The vast majority of my tiddlers have titles like 1-010, 25-030. That is chapter_number–section_number. The “actual title” for human reading purposes lives in a subtitle or caption field. (I also use a uuid field to allow free renumbering without link issues).

This is a valid approach but the relink plugin including its subplugins, and now the View Template Tile “cascade”, almost eliminate a need to use internal UID’s (Unique Identification) other than using the existing title for the UID, Truly universal is another issue.

If the title is designed to be “machine readable” such as your hieratical key chapter_number–section_number then you intentionally hide the title from the user then really you are effectively separating the key from the title.

@Justin_H

it would be interesting if we were able to freely rename or redesignate a different field / field name to act as the tiddler id field, as the title field acts as right now.

This is possible now by turning this upside down, consider the title as the ID field and treat another like the caption as the “title”, we now have the “View Template Title cascade” to alter which field is presented as the title.

• Basically we present a different title when viewing tiddlers.
• I have two solutions here alt-title and masquerade and other have some as well.
  • Alt-title is displayed in the story, or the caption field and if none other the title is displayed
  • Masquerade - is basically a new tiddler transcluding another and with alt-title can look like the original.

@jeremyruston

While that would be possible, it wasn’t a design goal for TW5; as a result the name of the “title” field is spread through the code and would be quite hard to change.

I think we have gone beyond this now and we can keep it the way it is and still effectively;

@Justin_H

freely rename or redesignate a different field / field name to act as the tiddler id field

• By instead;

freely rename or redesignate a different field / field name to act as the “tiddler title” allowing the current title to act as an id field

• with the added advantage is you can limit this to just a subset of all tiddlers.