[Epiphany] Musings on Bookmarks from an Armchair Developer

[Steve McKay <steve colgreen com>]

...and a new Epiphany user.

Looking at Epiphany's 1.2 plan I'd have to guess that bookmark system 
has caught a lot of flack. Despite my own early reservations, I now like 
  the system. I believe it yields a more useful view on my booksmarks 
than did the previous hierarchical system I used. Maybe the reason that 
Epiphany's bookmark handing generates such heat from users is that the 
system is not radically different enough from the old hierarchical system.

My ugly past...

When using other browsers' folder based bookmarking systems I'd collect 
a large amount of bookmarks, then add a couple of "favorites" folders to 
my browser toolbar, leaving the non-favorites to collect dust. I still 
*want* all those other bookmarks, just like I want my browsing history, 
but I almost never use them.

Do it like Rhythmbox, you already are...

Maybe a next-gen bookmark system would look more like a set of views on 
a single database of visited sites (history), and manually added entries 
(bookmarks), all with and comments and other meta information attached 
to those records.

Rhythmbox is a great example of how presenting things (oggs and mp3s) 
based on queries against harvested meta information (id3 tags) can yield 
dramatically improved accessability/usability over traditional folder or 
list based browsing mechanisms.

In Epiphany's case "Topics" are a piece of meta information that is 
manually selected at the time a bookmark is added. The title and URL are 
pieces of meta information that is collected automatically when a 
history item is added. Other information that could be collected is the 
path followed between sites, and the date and time of day a site was 
visited, number of visits to a site, and so on.

I'm not sure how to best expose views on this data. Afterall, the entire 
Rhythmbox interface is dedicated to browsing the entries. I would still 
want to add my favorites folders to my bookmarks toolbar. So, maybe a 
stored query could represent a folder, and the bookmarks toolbar become 
effectively the Query results toolbar.

Queries would be something to the effect...
SELECT * FROM Bookmarks WHERE Topic="Gnome" ORDER BY visit_count LIMIT (10)

or we could get something like this 
<http://mozdev.org/pipermail/epiphany/2003-August/000093.html> by 
stacking queries or grouping by some other piece of meta information.

Of course this type of query could be easily formulated by a small, user 
friendly dialog box. Or users could just accept a default "favorites" 
menu item that reflects their most frequently/recently visited items 
automatically...no user intervention required, no bookmarks to add at all.

I could gush on, but I shan't.

Keep up the good work Marco and gang, and thanks for a nice clean browser!

--
Steve McKay <steve@colgreen.com>