Talk:Tags
From MozillaZine Knowledge Base
I think the distinction attempted regarding Labels and Tags is incorrect at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Tags#Labels_versus_Tags
I have not read the entire bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114656 because I am traveling, but AIUI there were three distinct changes in the 2006-2008 time period 1. allow number of assignments >5 2. change terminology from labels to tags (not a technical change in underlying capabilities) 3. UI to give users more control
- Tags are not just renamed labels with a higher limit and a enhanced user interface, so I think the distinction in the KB article was correct. Additional features were not added to labels in several steps, to
- eventually make them tags. Tags are a different design that replaced labels. To help make the transition easier 5 predefined tags were provided that had the same names as labels did.
- It was not possible to have multiple labels per message. The comments in that bug report mention that there was a hardcoded maximum number of five labels plus the special none label.
- Both http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=220693 and the bug report mentioned that "Current labels are essentially a hack that use a few unused bits in the .msf datastructure."
- You can create an arbitrary number of tags, and assign multiple tags to a message. They are stored quite differently than labels - a POP account uses a X-Mozilla-Keys: header while a IMAP account tries to
- store tags on the server using IMAP keywords. Using IMAP keywords means they are searchable and accessible from multiple IMAP clients, including some webmail front-ends. The bug report
- also mentioned "I think the concept of having unlimited labels, and a message being allowed more than one label is great. However this is totally out of line with how labels currently work. Labels are
- currently conceived as more being a *state* a message is in. The proposal is more similar to a way of *tagging* messages. The way the labels are currently stored makes it possible to change them without
- changing the length of the message, because it simply rewrites the fixed-size X-Mozilla-Status2 header.".
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird2:Tags#Implementation states "The key is an imap mod-utf7 version of the tag, suitable for use in a pref name, an imap keyword, and part of an x-mozilla-keys
- header. So, as you might guess, we actually store the key persistently, and translate it to the tag for display purposes. This also allows us to rename a tag by changing the pref without changing all the
- messages that have that tag. We can also remove a tag by removing the pref, and the key stored in the messages will then be ignored."
- Tanstaafl 08:29, 30 June 2018 (UTC)