Author: lorp[at]lorp.org
[Added to the original trac issue at 4.33pm, Monday, 23rd April 2007]

On the contrary, empty keys do make sense.

The useful part of a key-value pair is always the value; the key is metadata. Normal 'tags', as understood by Flickr and the rest of Web 2.0, are the bare data without any metadata. Perhaps metadata will be added later (by someone else?), perhaps never (sometimes it's difficult to think of metadata). Another way of thinking of the 'key' part is as the predicate in an RDF-style subject-predicate-object triple. Much as RDF and TBL crave predicates, communities love to associate subjects and objects without them!

Author: immanuel.scholz[at]gmx.de
[Added to the original trac issue at 4.41pm, Tuesday, 8th May 2007]

Replying to [comment:1 lorp[at]lorp.org]:

On the contrary, empty keys do make sense.

The useful part of a key-value pair is always the value; the key is metadata.

the "Key" and the "Value" are both value. Only because some people don't like the fact that you can add something like "nice_and_cheap_pub_on_left_side"="yes" doesn't make it invalid.

And only because some people think there are only a specific set of keys "allowed" doesn't make it invalid either.

(Should we discuss stuff in a ticket system? Move to the list?)

Author: iandees
[Added to the original trac issue at 6.32pm, Monday, 9th September 2013]

Cleaning old tickets.