Question

I’m creating a social site for teachers (non-programmers) on which teachers can add events, links, exercises, tips, lesson plans, books, etc.

Each of these items I want them to be able to add tags to as we do at StackOverflow.

However, because they are non-programming users, I thought that space-separated, nonspace tags and camelCase tags would lead to too much confusion, e.g.:

grammar teachingtips universityOfMinnesota phrasalverbs

and indeed on this similar stackoverflow question most of the answers suggested commas like this:

grammar, teaching tips, university of minnesota, phrasal verbs

but then I just signed up for a delicious.com account (which I don’t think has a very programmer-centric audience) and saw that they use spaces as well:

separate tags with spaces: e.g. hotels bargains newyork (not new york)

What has been your experience on this point in terms of the current UX trend for tags? Is the average Internet user accostumed to space-separated tags by now? I have to admit, I have never seen comma-separated tags on any major site I have used. Have you come upon a good way to combine them so it doesn’t even matter, e.g.:

grammar book reviews teaching tips

and e.g. have a quick algorithm which checks the number of current tags for:

grammar
grammar book
grammar book reviews
book 
book reviews
book reviews teaching
...

Answer 1

I’d go comma separated personally. You’ll note that Stackoverflow doesn’t but the tags are clearly delineated into their own boxes. Plus hyphens are often used for “spacing”. I’d say spaces are more natural to non-programmers than hyphens are however.