Sorting out tagging for WinRT (Windows Runtime) and Windows RT (Windows on ARM) [closed]

Question

There is the potential for much confusion between Windows RT, the edition of Windows which runs on ARM, and Windows Runtime, also known as WinRT, the application architecture.

• For Windows RT, we have windowsrt, a tag which existed but had no questions in it until I just asked one (a number of "Windows RT" questions need tagging with it). No tag synonyms. I request that it be renamed to windows-rt. (I would have used that, but because windowsrt existed—in spite of having no questions—it forbade my creating windows-rt.)

• For Windows Runtime (WinRT), we have winrt. A well used tag. No tag synonyms. I suggest that it be renamed to windows-runtime, with winrt retained as a synonym. Alternately, it could remain winrt with windows-runtime added as a synonym. There has already been discussion about which the tag should be, with consensus at that time (a year ago) being in favour of winrt, but since Windows RT has come on the scene (I don't remember whether it had been announced at that time or whether it was called Windows on ARM, but I don't believe it was yet Windows RT) it might be worth re-evaluating that decision as the potential for confusion is higher. (Though too, the name "WinRT" is probably more firmly cemented as what people understand.)

Naturally, the tag wikis need to make the distinction clear.

Quite why Microsoft chose to do it this way, I don't know. But they have, so we need to make the best of it and attempt to minimise tagging problems.

Answer 1

I want to do horrible things to the person that decided that the name of a developer technology would be the perfect name for Windows 8 on ARM. I mean, they couldn't even have the courtesy to call it Windows 8 RT. Nope, it's just plain old RT. That means we can't force the RT-the-OS to be windows-8-rt, as that'd be factually incorrect.

People are going to confuse the hell out of winrt-as-a-synonym and windows-rt. Especially new users and inexperienced developers. I've been nuking tag almost weekly for a few months now, as every time, the user was actually talking about Runtime-the-platform instead of RT-the-OS. Honestly, the main reason for this is that nobody had their hands on RT-the-OS because it's handed out only to OEMs. That situation changes on release day, October 26.

In an ideal world, we would blacklist winrt, because then users would have to pick between RT-the-OS and Runtime-the-platform. It removes a great deal of the possible ambiguity. Unfortunately, blacklisting a tag is a developer-only option, and the devs have shown little interest in doing blacklists for the sake of reducing ambiguity.

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A month later, we're finally starting to see questions that are actually about RT-the-OS instead of Runtime-the-platform. Argh, tag ambiguity irritates me so!

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This morning, someone found six questions that were actually worthy of the tag windows-rt. This means that they were actually about the OS in specific and not about Windows 8 or the Runtime. While the tag clearly needs to exist now, I continue to be very worried about the ambiguity of MS's imposed naming scheme. I still feel that winrt should be unsynonymized and blacklisted.

Answer 2

We need one tag that means "new object-oriented API for Metro apps", and one that means "restricted line of Windows for ARM tablets". I would mostly go with the suggestions of the opener.

For the API, we can use windows-runtime or winrt. The current tag is windows-runtime, but winrt has much more hits on google, and seems more natural. I would pick winrt as default, but don't care as long as both are there and synonyms.

For the OS, we can use windows-rt, or windows-arm. It doesn't matter if Windows RT is just an edition of Windows 8 (and thus the next version would be Windows 9 RT), or if it is considered a separate line like 9x, NT, ... (with the next version being Windows RT 9). Maybe the RT versions aren't supposed to have numbers at all in the future, because the customer isn't supposed to think about versions. Honestly, I believe not even Microsoft knows where they are going there, but it doesn't matter. We should just use windows-rt for questions regarding the peculiarities of this restricted windows-on-arm, and think about windows-8-rt later when the need arises to differentiate it from, say, windows-9-rt.

Regarding the confusion of Windows RT and WinRT, it doesn't help if we just leave out the tag for Windows RT. Instead, we should just continuously add tags where missing or wrong, and have helpful Wiki texts. If someone makes a mistake, we can just correct it. After all, people are supposed to learn something here :-)

Answer 3

You are quoting SO tags, that's a problem. It is a programmer's site and there's only one api for Windows store apps. The actual hardware it runs on is not a consideration. More to the point, if there actually is a specific problem with store apps on Windows RT then any such programmer should know about it.

Splitting these tags only makes sense on a site that deals with operating system or hardware specific questions. Like superuser.com