Re: GtkFileChooser API work (bookmarks)

[Damian Christey <damian ultrasoul com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 21:06 +0200, Ricardo Fernández Pascual wrote:
> El mar, 02-09-2003 a las 16:43, Rodrigo Moya escribió:
> > hmm, bookmarks. Wasn't there some work on freedesktop.org to have a
> > shred location for bookmarks? If so, the file selector could use that.
> 
> FWIW, XBEL is the nearest thing to a de facto standard for now. Both
> Konqueror and Galeon interoperate using it. It is far from perfect but
> it works reasonably well and is extensible.
> 
> Unfortunately, the Epiphany project decided to use their own proprietary
> format.

Going further off-topic, and speaking of things it's probably too late
to change:

 What I never understood is why we didn't adopt the .desktop file
standard for bookmarks, as it is already widely used throughout GNOME
and KDE.

.desktop files can, as far as I know:
1.) point to any URI
2.) have an associated icon, for "favicons"
3.) contain multiple categories for categorical bookmarks, like
Epiphany's
4.) Be arranged hierarchically in a directory tree, for hierarchical
bookmarks

Was it because of the additional overhead of loading a lot of little
files vs. one big XML file?  It would seem that this could be worked
around by caching the bookmarks in memory, and letting fam notify us of
changes to the bookmarks directory (or this may already be handled by
gnome-vfs).  This would also solve the locking problems of shared
bookmarks, without having to reinvent the filesystem, create a new file
standard, or both.

-- 
Damian Christey <damian ultrasoul com>