A tag cloud is a way to display a weighted list such that the
weight of each item is reflected by the size of the item's text. Tag clouds provide a quick way for one to eyeball a list and
ascertain what items are more prevalent. Oftentimes, each item in a tag cloud is rendered as a link that, when clicked, allows
the user to drill into the selected category. For example, given any parent/child relationship in a database, we may be interested
in seeing how many children each parent has, relative to one another. The following image of a tag cloud lists the
categories in the Northwind database, with the size of each item is proportional to the number of products for each category,
relative to the other categories. (Each category name, if clicked, takes the user to a page that lists the products for that
particular category.)
Tag clouds are commonly used in websites that support tagging.
Tagging is a technique of assigning a set of string values to a particular item - such as classifying a picture of your pet dog
at a photo sharing website with string tags like "dog", "pet", "adorable", and so on. Tags provide an informal way for
users to easily classify content and make it easy to visualize the most common tags and to drill down into a specific tag.
However, tag clouds are not limited to websites that support tagging and can be used to offer an alternative view of a weighted
list (such as parent/child data in a database).
In this article we'll examine how to build a tag cloud in ASP.NET. In this article we'll focus on accomplishing this
through code in an ASP.NET page's code-behind class. In a future article, we'll move this code out of the ASP.NET page and
into a stand alone, custom, compiled server control that supports data binding, use of declarative data source controls,
and so on. Read on to learn more!
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