[Epiphany] Bookmarks system

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

As follow up of the bookmarks discussion I decide to write a short
analisys of the debated issues. I believe they are somewhat related, so
it can be good to discuss them together.I'm using the term "topic" here
as a substitute of keyword, that sounded a bit crack.
Uhm it's long, hope it's not too boring ;)

TOPICS (VS TOPIC)

Epiphany provides the ability to associate a bookmark to multiple
topics.
Let's take one of my bookmarks as an example.

http://mpt.phrasewise.com/ (for who does not know, it's the blog of
Matthew Thomas, a guy interested in usability problems).

In epiphany I associated it to two topics: "Usability" and "Blogs".
In another bookmarks system I should have put it in my Usability folder
or in the Blogs folder (or in both using aliases).

I think this works better when the user has to browse bookmarks and find
it. I can think to two situations that makes me access that site.

- Everyday I have a look to blogs of people I'm interested to. So I open
the dialog, look in the main list for the word "mpt". When I have many
bookmarks I cant find it immediately. I switch my eyes to the keywords
list looking for something that remind me what I'm willing to browse
(people blogs). If I fail or take some time to find the
topic/category/folder where the site I'm looking is stored I'm a bit
irritated: it would have been simpler to just type mpt in the
autocompletion or in the search entry of the bookmarks dialog.

- Sometimes I have an usability doubt and I remember Matthew has
something to say about that (or simply I hope he has and I go to search
about it). In this case looking at the topics list it would be hard for
me to catch immediately the Blogs category, while Usability would get my
attention immediately.
I have the impression that bookmarks editor provide me a way to store my
bookmarks in some static categories. When I look for it I'm supposed to
something like Cat -> Animals. But things appear to be a bit more
complex at least in my experience, the association never so direct. In
this example the context can push my thoughts in different directions.

This is the main reason why I believe it works better for me. I'm basing
this just on my experience. I'm obviously trying to abstract from it,
but observing other people could help more.

The problems comes when adding and organizing bookmarks. The ability to
provide several topics for each bookmark require a more complex
interface than a single topic mode (basically a combo). There are some
proposals in bugzilla but I'm not completely happy with any of them.
Consider that make the bookmarks editor interface complex conflicts
badly with the target of making it a way to fastly access bookmarks
discussed later.

Finally the question here is: is that complexity worth ?

http://www.kaylon.com/why.html (this is an external bookmarks
application for windows that use a similar concept)
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/tagbk-draft.pdf (If I remember well
there are some points against the bookmarks hierarchy in the first part
of the document)

BOOKMARKS DIALOG (VS BOOKMARKS MENU)

In epiphany the main way to browse bookmarks is supposed to be the
dialog. I think submenus are hard to use, and things get worst while the
bookmarks collection grows.
A dialog, if kept very simple, can provide an easier way to find the
bookmark you need: it's easier to use and more powerfull (contains for
example search capabilities).
Also I feel the ability to provide a flat list of most used bookmarks in
the Go menu more useful than a dup of the session history.
To avoid the conflict with people used to the menu, we could allow to
drag All on the toolbars.

http://www.apple.com/safari/ (The bookmarks part)

DIALOG (VS TOPLEVEL WINDOW)

(Daveb, I'm replying to you here)

Looking to the bugs Dave is submitting, the real choice appear to be:
open bookmarks from a central place that you keep open while browsing or
provide a way to open bookmarks in the current window.
The way Dave is proposing to browse here is more or less:
Open the bookmarks dialog, double click on a bookmark that will open a
new window, read, close window, switch back to bookmarks editor ...
Is the analisys correct?

My impression is that this is more complex than "Open a new window and
select the page you want to open there" and less consistent with the
normal way of opening urls (is this a problem though ?).
In general I think it would make more sense to implement this at desktop
level. (but cant nautilus already act like that ?).

Marco