What is your opinion on whether a tagging user interface widget should require commas or spaces as the delimiter? For example, this site uses spaces, requiring multi-word tags to use a hyphen. I assumed this was some design suggestion from Joel; but then I realized that Facebook and Wordpress use commas.
So what should it be? Or does it not matter much? Let's suppose the users of this widget are generally computer literate but not terribly so.
Be fault-tolerant, if possible. For example, would it work to use whatever is provided? The following two inputs could result in the same, if parsed nicely:
foo bar "hello world"
foo, bar, hello world
Both would result in three obvious tags.
I realize that this would it make hard to parse the following input unambiguously:
hello world
In that case, I'd probably read two distinct tags.
i would go for a comma as it is more natural to separate multiple word tags by commas then use hyphens or other less usable replacement techniques
I would try to think about the domain of the tags and figure out what is the likelihood that potential tags would contain spaces.
For example, most things on this site are single word or acronyms, so it's not difficult to use spaces.
On the other hand, when tagging facebook photos, for example, an average tag is something like "spring break", "frat party", "random hookup", "secretary of state", etc. So dealing with space interpretation or with quotes is more difficult, hence commas make more sense.
I'm not familiar with a specific rule.
If you're thinking of tag clouds though, spaces make less sense.
I don't think it matters. I think for a programming site, most of your tags will not be multi-word so it makes to use a space delimiter. But I think you could make a very compelling argument either way and it really just comes down to personal choice.
commas. it is more natural. you can use words that include spaces more easily. other solutions seem to complicated for human beings (maybe not for programmers but they think different - remember the "u" in gui stands for "user")