[Tagging] Values in namespaces/prefixes/suffixes Considered Harmful - Or: Stop over-namespacing and prefix-fooling

[Markus]

On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 at 02:05, Stefan Keller <sfkeller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's really turning processing of key-values (or key-value pairs KVP,
> entity-attribute-values EAV, dictionnaries, associative arrays, map
> collections, Hash stores/hstores) ad absurdum. In addition to the
> troubles of over-namespacing mentioned above there are following
> consequences of prefix-fooling - among others (sticking at the example
> "service:bicycle:retail=yes;service:bicycle:repair=yes;"):
>
> * Existing code to validate and cleanup values is in vain: One can't
> check with usual functions if a value is in range
> "retail,repair,second_hand".
> * Existing code to match is in vain too: Prefix-fooled keys pretend to
> have mixed cases (which they should'nt).
> * Worse, users still extend "yes/no" values to arbitrary values (which
> again makes processing unnecessarily complicated).
> * Even worse, users are encouraged to invent new sparsely used keys
> (which we can't prevent, but it's less harmful in the values).
> * Source code is flooded by boolean expressions (which would else be a
> single function) and need to be predefined in the code (instead of
> being put in values).
> * Values in namespaces/prefixes/suffixes are hard or impossible to
> search, match, count or group in computer languages, including SQL.

I'm a bit late but thank you, Stefan, for your explanation!

Regards, Markus