Member Avatar for tgreer

I think I've posted on this before, but I find the overall site categorization non-intuitive. "Software Development" vs. "Web Development" doesn't make sense to me. Web development IS software development. I propose the site be organized by software development languages and platforms.

DHTML/AJAX includes working with XML/XSLT, so where do I post? I do my ASP.NET development in C#, so again, where do I post? Where do I post if I have a question about Regular Expressions? Those posts are scattered across the forum.

If I'm working out a Regular Expression, I should be able to post specifically in a RegEx forum, instead of trying to figure out whether to post in PHP, ASP.NET, Java, C#, Legacy and Other Languages, etc.

Likewise, where do VBScript or VBA questions belong? VBScript can be used for Windows Shell Scripting, or for ASP development. And so on...

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Member Avatar for Dani

While I agree with you, the flip side is that it's really difficult to organize categories and subcategories in a forum where there is overlap just about everywhere. Every technology can be used with every other technology. That's why we use tags so that you can cross-reference topics. A lot of the newer Q&A communities such as StackOverflow work off of tags alone, completely eliminating the need for a prewritten static selection of categories.

Member Avatar for tgreer

Perhaps it's just the way I work. I tend to need to solve very specific problems, and how they fit into a larger context is a separate, or "meta" issue. Figuring out an XSLT Transform, or even just part of it, is a singular task, and if other programmers on the project use it in a C# class, or within a Document Management System, or as part of a PHP program, isn't necessarily relevant to me. Projects in my environment usually have an "Ask Tom" component and success is measured by how often I hear "that worked!".

I digress. My point is that, if the current site organization works for most Daniweb users, then it works. If others shared a similar frustration and wanted language-specific forums, they would have chimed in... and they didn't. So, thread solved.

Drop me a line, love to catch up with you.

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