Thank you so much for those beautiful pictures. I am totally taken by the Persian carpet. The beautiful colours and the best of patterns all in one carpet.
The patterns we know from the old carpets have been reused in simplified form in many crafts. Knitting and crochet patterns, embroidery. Something else but can still be beautiful.
Now we can use your SE plugin to weave our own tiddlywiki beauties.
Hi Birthe and Mohammad,
Just to be clear, I was not trying to belittle patchwork quilts or the fine people who make them. It is a beautiful art form, as displayed by Mohammadâs example. I fully appreciated and enjoyed both of your posts.
That said, I stand by what I wrote. My first point was that software conjures the image of new and modern and cutting edge. Patchwork quilts typically project a very different image. And so my opinion, right or wrong, is that patchwork isnât the best word in a software context. Compound and composite are better.
The other two points in my post come from a different image, that of patching software, which is based on patching holes in clothing. That is a negative image in a software context, the admission that a piece of software needs patching up. The comment about cobbling things together with whatever scraps one can find comes from this image, not from that of patchwork quilts.
I hope that helps to clarify. Blessings.
Sorry Iâm so late to this discussion â also of philosophical interest to me!
Metaphors of âflatnessâ (as in flat, non-reflective paint as much as flat file) or âopacityâ or âthinnessâ strike me as potentially helpful for tiddlers whose content doesnât shift much according to oneâs angle of view. âStaticâ is also helpful, and maybe âbasicâ (at the base, straightforward). Perhaps also âconcreteâ to get at the tactile sense of where one comes up against solid stuff, or self-contained. (So some complementing terms might be: deep, refractive, holographic, entangled âŚ)
One worry about âcompoundâ vs âsimpleâ rhetoric is that (what Iâm calling) âbasicâ tiddlers (or concrete, etc.) can still be quite structurally complex â not only potentially long, but chock full of fields.
And that fact brings us to a further question of clarification:
Is it just by examining the text field that weâre determining whether a tiddler is static / plain / flat / basic?
REASON/CONTEXT for YES: For most of my purposes, I do often implicitly make such a distinction with reference to the text field only; there are so many contexts (such as an expandable TOC, or expandable rows in Shiraz dynamic tables) where whatâs displayed is just the wikified text field⌠(So I do a little âDoh!â when Iâm forced to remember how some apparently ordinary tiddler â camouflaged among others that all âlookâ simple in view mode â doesnât really contain what I thought it did⌠I may have lost the thread because the tiddler was âknottyâ â or is it ânaughtyâ? 
)
In those cases (mentally tracking which tiddlers behave straightforwardly under transclusion), itâs usually immaterial whether helpful dynamic elements might be hanging out in other fields; the tiddler is still effectively flat/self-contained in terms of the predictability and âportabilityâ of its essential contents. (Those dynamic elements may just be linkstyles which pull from icons or color templates beyond the tiddler, for example.)
REASON/CONTEXT for NO: There are situations where the ârefractiveâ aspect of other fields may really matter. For example, suppose a tiddler contains student work in the text field, and elements of my feedback and evaluative rubric in various fields. Sometimes a field contains a substantive but frequently-used âboilerplateâ comment, which I house elsewhere and transclude. If the source-tiddler housing that comment were deleted (or if my content-tiddler were dragged to another wiki without that detail), some of my content seemingly evaporates. And thatâs one issue Iâm implicitly wanting to track when I think about which tiddlers are âbasicâ / portable / flat / static.
Of course, any particular metaphor we choose is likely to come up against some limits or need for situation-specific qualifying remarks⌠but brainstorming resonances, and thinking through some of those limits in advance, is something a forum like this can do well.
Best regards to all â enjoying the patchwork of insights here!
Thank you for detailed explanation @Springer
I like to add two of important points you discussed in your post
By the way, in my real work I highly relay on portable tiddlers!
I am summarizing this thread in TW-Scripts, and I would use the terminology in kookma plugins!
@DaveGifford
In reality we will use plain tiddler and compound tiddler most of the time! but let me use patchwork tiddler NOT patch tiddler note to the work in patchwork as special subtype of compound tiddler! Using composite instead of patchwork which is very similar to compound makes confusion! Please remember the Persian rug when you hear patchwork tiddler! 
I love the philosophy of tiddlers as described in official documentation see: https://tiddlywiki.com/#Philosophy%20of%20Tiddlers
The purpose of recording and organizing information is so that it can be used again. The value of recorded information is directly proportional to the ease with which it can be re-used.
The philosophy of tiddlers is that we maximize the possibilities for re-use by slicing information up into the smallest semantically meaningful units with rich modelling of relationships between them. Then we use aggregation and composition to weave the fragments together to present narrative stories.
TiddlyWiki aspires to provide an algebra for tiddlers, a concise way of expressing and exploring the relationships between items of information.
Iâm not super passionate about the subject, but want to lend support that I agree with @DaveGiffordâs position on meaning patchwork in the software realm. Iâm coming from a Canadian-American perspective, and (at least at first) I would be a little insulted if you called software I provided as patchwork. I can see that in different cultures that negative association would not apply (or would be a positive one) which is great, but itâs a little bit of our duty here as a diverse community to at least make others that come from different cultures aware of those connotations.
At Patchwork Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com, you can see a little bit of context - synonomous with
hodgepodge, irregular, improvised, incongruous variety of pieces.
I think the distinction made between patch and patch-work is not great enough to separate things. Essentially I interpret it as the opposite of solid, organized, and of singular vision. I would interpret patchwork software similar to the expression âheld together with duct tapeâ - so working, but in need of a rewrite to bring consistency back.
Just my two cents. I already have to avoid other âofficialâ terminology (tiddler, tiddly) for different but adjacent reasons, so if patchwork is the consensus, Iâll add it to the list of things to mentally rename.
@stobot
Please also see American Heritage and Oxford dictionary
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/patchwork?q=patchwork
By the way having plain and compound, what do you propose for a master document equivalent?
or the patchwork tiddler suggested here!
Please do not propose: complex, composite, master, index tiddler!
Example of Patchwork Tiddler
Title: Life Quote
Text:
<$list filter="[tag[life-quotes]]">
<$transclude mode=block/>
</$list>
Again, like Dave, Iâm not trying to say that patchwork CANâT be a very positive term - just that it CAN be taken negatively, which are not equivalent things. Essentially I agree with you that patchwork has some great and positive connotations, but also suggest itâs missing the important bit.
Iâm trying to really understand the boundaries between the words you describe, and from what I can tell youâre distinguising based on:
If it really is intended to be that continuum, then adjectives that fall on the same continuum make sense to me. Simple with Complex, Static with Dynamic etc. I donât know if the âTemplate Tiddlersâ was intending to be in this batch, but I do think thatâs a good one for when you build a âcontact templateâ, âtask templateâ, âreview templateâ⌠So, I think itâd be important to talk about the options in batches of the 3 so they can be most easily compared. As a method to generate these sets, I think about picking the two extremes, and then finding a word that fits as a mix of the extremes:
I kind of like #1 there as itâs a uniqueness to TiddlyWiki that some only some units contain actual content, and theyâre mixed in with other units with no âcontentâ at all at a peer level. Anyways, those are just my thoughts.
I think this is correct! except the template is excluded!
Mohammad I will âletâ you do anything you want. 
My opinions here are just that, opinions. But in the end I support whatever you and the rest of the community want to do.
Has anyone mentioned âhybridâ for mixed content tiddlers? That might be an option to consider.
Coming together is easy when we see eye-to-eye. Yet the more we look, the closer we look, the deeper we look, the greater the differences seem, and the wider the cracks appear. So we span them, bridge them, engineer a way to leap across them with ease and maintain them at great cost even though once, we didnât need them.
Itâs not turtles, nor is it turtles all the way down.
Anyone else hear the tower creaking?
I do not hear any tower creaking. We are in this group due to our love for tiddlywiki, and right here in this topic due to our interest in Mohammads SE plugin.
It is hardly surprising that words mean different things to different people, living in different countries in different circumstances - and many not native English speakers.
Also words are historically constantly shifting a little in meaning.
I see people discussing with respect for each other.
My point. Iâm suggesting we may be overthinking it
Inspired by this thread, off line I made a list of âtiddler typesâ at a logical or terminology level as I use in my head, from my experience with tiddlywiki. Needless to say I came up with dozens.
I think the issue is that when we use a term such as âcompound tiddlerâ we can find within the community what is intended by that term. Whilst I applaud Mohammadâs attempt to guide the terminology I am not sure we can structure this too much as it gets complex quickly and given this has being informal for so long, I dont think we can coral all these into a structured system.
However I think a simple tiddler and compound tiddler serves the original purpose to indicate the difference between self contained tiddlers and one constructed from and dependant on other tiddlers. However even compond tiddlers can be bundled and handled as one, such as streams tiddlers, because the related or subtiddlers is strait forward. It is when a compound tiddler is made up of others and it becomes hard to disentangle it from the wiki I would be tempted to use another term such as composite *made of other tiddlers" but not constructed as a compound tiddler (where the compounding follows a set of clear rules),
All that matters is when communicating we ensure the terms are defined sufficiently for the scope in which it is applied, and they are familiar and searchable within the community. For example use tiddlywiki for what it is good at [[compound tiddler]] containing the definition in your wiki.
Does any one want to see my list of tiddler types?
Whatâs in a name? A tiddler by any other name would be as semantically smallâŚ?
nuff said. ââ