I ask this question because I believe it has ramifications on the effectiveness of search on stack overflow, and also will serve as a guide on my future editing activities on SO (generally geared towards improving the ability to search and view questions).
There seems to be a recent shift (to some extent) in what is considered proper tags on stack overflow.
For example, consider the positioning tag and the styles tag. These are now marked as "DO NOT USE", in favor of using more technology specific tags (such as wpf-positioning, wpf-styles, css-styles). This seems to be in direct contrast to an earlier (as I understand) desired practice of pairing the technology with more generic tags, as referred to in this post, for example:
wpf-tags-need-cleanup-do-they-not
I find 90% of the value of the stack overflow site to be the marvelous library of existing questions and answers, and that is where I usually go first when I have questions. I use search by tags a lot. In my opinion, having tags as generic as possible, and technology specific when necessary gives a great deal more search flexibility. You can pair tags and add other conditions as necessary (it sure would be nice to be able to save these as favorite searches). For example, if I want to do a general search relating to styles, I'll search use styles, if it's specific to wpf, then wpfstyles.
So, what is the current practice on use of technology specific tags vs. more generic tags? And, if there has been a shift in this practice, what are the plans for cleaning up existing questions (so that searching via tags will still yield decent results)?