Donmai

Disambiguating the diving suit/wetsuit tags

Posted under Tags

Currently, the diving suit tag on the site is being used ambiguously. It has no wiki, so there's some overlap with wetsuit: 172 posts tagged with both, as of writing, and more wetsuits tagged only under diving suit. It's no wonder there's overlap since a wetsuit is a type of diving suit. Theoretically, the diving suit tag should be an umbrella for wetsuits and other types of diving suits. There's also the issue of an untagged class of diving suit, that being the classic standard diving dress. There are plenty of examples on the site right now, such as post #4547042, post #4147463, and post #6385611. The best way to find art using this suit right now is by searching with diving helmet. However, that also returns art like post #3850819, where the character is wearing a different type of diving helmet distinct from the helmet of the standard diving dress.

The standard diving dress is a specific model of dry suit, a type of diving suit which acts opposite to a wetsuit: instead of letting water in, the suit is designed to keep water out. As such, it's typically drawn as baggy or made of coarse material and is not skintight. A dry suit is usually meant to be used for deep water diving or diving in cold waters.
Some examples for comparison:
post #6373843 A wetsuit
post #5688866 A dry suit
post #2364603 Standard diving dress, utilizes a dry suit
post #4255395 Dry suit on the left, wetsuit on the right

One option would be to turn the diving suit tag into an umbrella for wetsuits, dry suits, standard diving dress, and perhaps other types of diving suits. There are suits like "semi-dry suits" and "hot water suits", but they resemble wetsuits and would be hard to distinguish in art. This would require an implication of wetsuit to diving suit. An alternative is to repurpose the diving suit tag for dry suits via alias and clear it of wetsuits. It depends on whether having an umbrella for a small number of diving suits would be useful. Either way, I want to make a dry suit tag and standard diving dress tag in order to tag these currently amibiguous diving suits. I would prefer the first option, but feedback is appreciated.

nonamethanks said:

Shouldn't standard diving dress implicate dry suit then? Or am I misunderstanding the tag?

The case in which the standard diving dress wouldn't imply dry suit is if it was just the helmet on its own. There are a few examples like post #1490170 and post #1352464 where the character is wearing or holding the helmet of a standard diving dress outfit, but isn't wearing the dry suit that accompanies it. Though I don't know if these should get a diving suit tag either, even if the helmet is of standard diving dress, since they're wearing other clothes. The option here would be to remove SDD from the implication and use it as a "if a piece is present, tag this" sort of tag.

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