[Tagging] Wiki Edit War on using/avoiding semicolon lists

[Richard Welty]

i've removed prior discussion so that this can stand on its own.

i admit that the distinction between keys and values is a bit
blurry; it would be a fallacy to claim that data goes only in
values because that's obviously not completely true.

however, i will assert that for key space to be useful it needs
to be managed; pushing to much arbitrary data into the key
space reduces its utility.

from this point of view, having colour in key space makes sense
but having the actual names of colours as subkeys seems to me
to be overloading too much data value into the key side. for
every parsing problem you simplify on the value side by flipping
data into subkeys, you create additional complexity when data
consumers must navigate key space.

what we're doing now is not necessarily ideal, the fact that
we're having this discussion shows this. however, moving
a bunch of data data into key space to avoid semicolons
does not strike me as an improvement.

richard

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