LJ tagging: baby steps

[cellio]

Since about 30 seconds after LJ announced the tagging feature I have been wanting boolean search for tags, so that I could find entries tagged A and (B or C) or the like. This has never been possible.

Today in news they announced that you can search for entries with two tags (specifically two) using the following syntax:

http://username.livejournal.com/tag/tag1,tag2?mode=and

(Substitute for username, tag1, and tag2, of course.)

That's great. This will help. But I can't help wondering... why this implementation? I tried it with three tags; it took the first two and ignored the third. I tried mode=or; didn't work. I assume from this interface that they'll be extending this to support the latter; it makes sense to introduce a "mode" argument now and support other options later. But what kind of implementation limits the parameters to two? I'm trying to imagine the design that produced this result and seemed like a good idea to the dev team, and I'm coming up blank. (Yes, I know LJ is open-source so theoretically I could go look. I don't care that much.) Isn't it just as easy to process arg1,arg2,...argn as to parse arg1,arg2?

So yay for the beginnings of expressive tagging, but I do hope more is coming.

Comments

[cellio]

Oh! Yes, that's a good point. With this many users and not a few malefactors out there, that could be a problem waiting to happen.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what I was thinking. I know we have trouble with multiple query strings by two users pushing, say, our work Barracuda server out of its comfort zone. I can just imagine what malefactors might do.