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Use case or problem
Different relationships like friend or foe. Friend being green for red.
I think this is a really important feature and should be part of the core. Obsidian is great for networking ideas. But right the links in the network only shows one type of relationship, ie. if there is a relationship.
It should also show what kind of relationship exists through different colors.
And that color be based on some new link annotation syntax, maybe as done for the image when you want to hint at display size. I have the same problem that unless putting everything in the YAML, all links are treated equals or can only be searched/sorted/specified according to the target document which is not always the case.
My use case :
I have notes related to projects (tag or folder), I have notes related to technologies (tag or folder). When I discuss the technologies used in the project I write things like “This projects uses technology A, because it’s much faster than technology B. Alternally, we also considerd technology C and D, but those where not a good fit for the following reasons”.
When looking in either search view or graph view, my project is now linked to technology A, B, C and D just because they were all mentionned, irrespective of the semantic of my text that only A entertain a “used by” link and not merely “mentionned by”. Same for people i could list people working on the project but as soon as i would mention a random someone who ever worked on a random something inside the project page, that person is now also linked to the project. I have no way to annotate the people links inside the project page to make a distinction between “being mentionned” or “working on” the project.
For me this is one of the core feature of a “link as first class citizen” claim, without it it is still much of a wiki / web page with hyperlink, as i can’t write those annotations, use them to define better search, and there is no work around except duplicating everything from the text into YAML and then using some dataview magic, loosing the natural thing of writing text first.
Yeah, I have a whole bunch of companies and they are all linked together. Some of them are suppliers some of them are partners and some of them are competitors with each other. Right now everything is just a gray link… not very useful.
I need to see how changes in relationships in one area affects the rest of the network. But before I figure that out, I need to know what the relationship is, not just there is a relationship.
Well you can technically have tag: [[value]] into your YAML, and I would say it’s the only current work arround, because if you don’t use a link, then Obsidian will not update it if you change that note title.
Arguments from not doing that are that :
It unfortunately conflict with YAML Syntax for lists, so it would be parsed by a compliant parser as a list of list, and to avoid that you would need quotes, and then it becomes even less readable and desirable.
More importantly, I like meta data to be meta datas, from the moment I have to put things that should be in the content inside the front matter, or worse have them redundant and not in sync both in the note and in the front matter, I loose that nice aspect about note taking that links can be created just from natural text.
No amount of working around can bring links representing named relationships.
Syntax wise they already have a way to express some attributes to links:
[[My File.pdf#page=number]]
[[image.png|100x100]]
So it’s just a matter of desiring that functionality enough to have is developped in a future version
