Re: [Epiphany] Bookmarks

["Jon A. Solworth" <solworth parsys cs uic edu>]

	See comments below:

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 23:22, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 11:27, Jon A. Solworth wrote:
> > 	Bookmark management is one of the most critical issues
> > for the active web user.  The following are important criteria
> > for me:
> > 	1. Hierarchy
> > 	2. Easy to add bookmarks in the appropriate place in
> > 	    the hierarchy
> > 	3. Ability to reorganize, search for dead bookmarks,
> > 	    export to html
> 
> Two things:
> 
> 1 Unfortunately what is important for me and you is not necessarily
> what is important for the majority of users. Things would be much easier
> if it was but ...
> 2 I fail to see why hierarchy itself should be important. What's
> important for an user is to be able to store and retrieve his bookmarks,
> in the more efficient way. It's possible that hierarchy is the best way,
> but that needs to be proved.
> A good try at proving why hierarchy isnt the best way is here:
> http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/associative-interfaces.pdf
> Mostly to show a good, rational method of dealing with usability issues.

	I agree that hierarchy is not the desired property per se, but
	one way (not necessarily the best) of implementing it.  The
	properties that one gets from hierarchy is:
		1. Clustering: related material is together
		2. Scan a short list and click: find things
			quickly
		3. I would think that a fully automatic system would be
		 sufficiently inaccurate that an overide would be
		 needed.
> 
> > I think by far the best architecture would be an external
> > bookmark editor with a well defined interface.  This would
> > enable competing editors and to find the best way of dealing
> > with this problem.
> 
> Personally I dont think the solution to an usability problem is to allow
> alternatives, in most cases they end up to be equally broken, at least
> in my experience. Keep to work and to think on issues often give better
> results.

No, I wasn't advocating a choice of 12 different bookmark editors. 
But an effective bookmark editor is critical for heavy users.  If
you've got some very experimental ideas to try to move forward,
great.  But also with experimental ideas, some work and some don't.

The issue of making it external was for two reasons: one to enable
faster and wider experimentation and two because I think externalizing
it would make for a cleaner design.  Look at it this way, bookmarks
are a directory service while browsers are a viewing system.

> Anyway, we have a plugin architecture, and allowing to install a
> different editor is not the most difficult/nonsense thing.
> 
> Marco
-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
Jon A. Solworth                 	
Computer Science Dept. (M/C 152)	url: http://parsys.cs.uic.edu/~solworth
University of Illinois at Chicago       telephone: (312) 996-0955
851 S. Morgan Rm 1120 SEO    		FAX:       (312) 413-0024
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