Feature Request: Consistent terminology

Core Development Feature Requests
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I know I'm not the only one to notice that the use of Flow, Tab, and sequence are not consistent and often confusing. I understand that many "long timers" will find what I say next to be a blaspheme so I'll :duck: as soon as I post this. :open_mouth:

How about we call a tab a Tab or Worksheet, instead of flow. Flow, in my mind, is a series of nodes that accomplish a task and is the best word for what many now call a Sequence. To me, a sequence is a series of nodes that may be just a section of what I like to call a Flow, often useful when helping someone in the community to understand a point by focusing on just a portion of a Flow.

As an example, here is what I just noticed in the side panel (if that's the correct term) help for the Status node (not status node in a sub...um, Tab? I'm sure there's a better term that does not use Flow but it's not coming to mind at the moment):

"By default the node reports status for all nodes on the same workspace tab."

To me that is very clear.

Anyway, that's my suggestion and I'll don my flame-retardant suit now.

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This is definitely one of the things I want to pick up and standardise on. I half wrote a similar post last week but ended up not posting it as I wasn't ready for the responses. However I would like to get agreed documentation in place for the next major release.

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The main problem with this is the technical one of the context storage. Right now what is called flow context applies to everything on a tab and indeed is a (sometimes) useful way to share data between two co-located "flows". We are not about to try to rename that to tab context as it is all the way through the code, nor are we going to change flow context to only apply to a set of connected nodes. But yes if there are glaring examples that could be tidied up please point them out.

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Your totally correct in that the "flow" word is very ambiguous - even to us long timers.

I'd love to see "tab" used when appropriate but I think its too late as changing would require complete rewrite of all contrib nodes

My own personal issue is the node context which isn't called node.context but just context.

C'est la vie

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    1. Tab would be more useful. Especially in places where we see tabs (info bar).

Just yesterday was giving an internal session - and had a challenge explaining tab vs. flow.
Then stuck to tab term - to collection on a "page". And each independent piece on a tab is a "flow".

Also explained to them - that not to be surprised if both are used interchangeably online.

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