You don't have to be a constructivist epistemologist (or know what one is) to know that words matter. Naming things is part of how we structure the world. And in Decko, naming patterns are a big part of both how we structure data and how we interact with it.
naming+Feature
The following are key to understanding Decko's naming power:
- name variants - simple handling of plurals, spaces, and punctuation
- compound names - structured names that help to structure data
- contextual names - incomplete names interpreted differently in different contexts
- renaming - supports automated updates of name references to simplify data management
- autonaming - for cases where names actually don't matter so much.
naming+practices
In principle, Decko's naming power is intended to make you feel safe and strong - NOT like you're walking on eggshells. You should be able to create and change names without worrying that things will fall apart. The following practices are helpful for keeping your data clean and beautiful, but they're ultimately just suggestions, not formal guidelines.
- Each card types should have a naming pattern. For example, if you're creating a database about colors, then you will likely want to decide whether each color's canonical name should be Capitalized, CamelCased, plural, singular, etc. It doesn't matter what you choose, but "yellow", "red", "green" creates a much tidier looking list than "YELLOW", "red", "Green".
- types themselves should be singular and capitalized. In the above example, the cardtype would be named "Color", not "Colors" or "color". Of course, the name variants would work regardless, but this pattern will keep the names consistent with the built-in types
- The right side of cards with compound names should match other similar cards' right sides. For example, if you add a card named "desk+height" and then want to add a card about the height of "bookshelf", name it "bookshelf+height". That allows you to specify Set that will include all height cards. (Decko sets are not arbitrarily definable, but two ways to do so are via their type or their right side name.)
(NOTE - here are the name-related tickets (ignore the link below)