# Anatomy Of A Note

A Tinderbox note collects a bundle of information — usually a focused bundle concerning one specific concept, task, or idea.

Internally, a note is a long list of attributes and values. For example, in the note above, we have:

attribute | value
Name | Among Others
Subtitle | Jo Walton
Color | poppy
Color2 | light poppy
BorderColor | red
Caption | Hugo award winner

Tinderbox has several hundred built-in system attributes which have special meaning to the system. You can also add your own user attributes. If we need to distinguish between the name of an attribute and something else, we place a “$” before the attribute name: “Name” is a word, and $Name is an attribute.

Any note may also contain other notes. We call a note that contains other notes a container; any note may be a container.

Tinderbox also offers several special kinds of notes.

- Adornments decorate the background of maps to help make maps more clear. Adornments appear only in maps.
- Separators are simple lines that appear only in outlines and help to make long lists more clear.
- Aliases are notes that refer to a second note within this Tinderbox document. Aliases let the same note appear in several places in the document; most changes made to the alias are automatically applied to the original note as well.
- Agents are notes that search your Tinderbox document continuously for notes that meet the agent’s criteria. If an agent finds a note that satisfies its criteria, it automatically places an alias of that note inside the agent. The agent can also apply an action to notes it finds. For example, one agent might find notes that represent overdue library books and automatically set their color to red.