The concept of hierarchy in Gestalt 2

From Gestaltipedia

From its very first version, the Gestalt 2 toolkit was designed to be as flexible as possible.

Limits of traditional site development

In the mind of the original developers, one of the limiting factors in how websites were traditionally constructed had to do with hierarchy getting in the way of the free addition of information. Users would over-think the structure of their site, which would turn into a collection of interlinked blank pages; the tree structure attempting to do the work of the content. Contributors would end up married to a structure and then shoe-horn material into it, even when it was not appropriate, simply because they had fallen in love with the tidy hierarchy they invented.

Or, worse yet, they might have ideas for content but lack the organizational skills to put it into a hierarchy that made sense– but be forced to (poorly) because the traditional tenets of web design declared it so. Either way, less information was going into a site then there would be if they were simply allowed to shovel material in without regard to the way that it was structured.

Reaction of Gestalt developer

The philosophy of the Gestalt developer was a reaction to this: that information itself should provide its own template for organization. At the time that the system was originally developed, this was not a popular point of view, but has been borne out over time through emerging conventions of keyword tagging, and other approaches to metadata where structure of information is emergent rather than arbitrary.

Accommodation of user needs

Still, the requirements of most users to feel comfortable working within a finite information space that they can visualize and understand has driven the need for Gestalt to be able to accommodate those needs. So, while information stored in a Gestalt database is not particularly hierarchical, it can be made so fairly easily by simply tagging information with the identity of other articles that should be either above or below it. This structure is not exclusive, so information that may be in a hierarchy may also be in other hierarchies, or maybe cross-linked with keywords, or maybe tagged or filtered in some other way.

So, in this way, the Gestalt toolkit allows people to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak.

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