Proposal: Enhancements to File Tags + Header Tags

[FaultyFunctions]

Introduction

File tags can currently contain anything after the #, this functionality could be extended to header tags. We could also add a separator for file tags, similar to === and --- for nodes and node headers respectively.

Rationale

File tags are extremely useful because you can store whatever data you want in them. The user has complete control over how to use them. This is great on a file-wide level but this should also be available on a node-level.

The file tag separator would also follow the convention and enable easier parsing for node files. This would also allow us to get rid of the # requirement for file tags. File tags would be read per line just like everything else.

Proposed solution

Proposed file format:

Filetag1
Filetag2, I can do whatever here!
~~~
title: My Node Title
a node header tag, I can do whatever here!
Another node tag!
---
node content here
===

• ~~~ denotes we are done reading file tags and are now reading nodes. (Or some other separator)
• There is no more need for hashtags in front of file tags with this proposal. This would be consistent with how everything else is read already.
• title: would be a special case to check against to find the title of the node. This would still be a requirement.
• After that, users can put whatever they want in their header tags separated by new lines. They can follow the Name:Content convention or do whatever else for their own needs.

Backwards Compatibility

This obviously isn't compatible with the current language set but it would actually simplify parsing the language. This wouldn't be too hard to convert between I don't think, but since the 2.0 spec is still in beta, breaking changes are to be expected.

[McJones]

There's been a bunch of discussion around this feature internally and we are genuinely unsure as to the best way to proceed around this. We like bits and pieces of this but are not in agreement as to how this would work or what changes it would need (if any). Despite not being a hard feature to implement because us internally can't agree on this we don't think we will be able to get this in before the v2 release. As such I am punting this down the path for a future version of the language.

[FaultyFunctions]

Perhaps in the future these internal discussions can be discussed here instead of leaving a proposal hanging for 10 months and then making the decision to push it back indefinitely, 7 days before the release of v2.

[McJones]

Totally agreed.

Overall we feel we have done a bad job with the spec, or rather done a bad job with the process of the spec (we think most of the details contained within are quite good). We aren't really sure what future versions of the spec evolution will go like, but the existing process is bad and we have no intention of doing that again, both for our sanity and everyone else.

[desplesda]

We feel that the functionality described in this proposal is now better served by extending the Yarn Project JSON file, rather than adding support for file-level hashtags in the source files themselves. Accordingly, I'll close this issue here. Thanks for the discussion in this thread, everyone!