Re: Browser Bookmarks Menu (Gnome Applet) 0.2

[Nigel Tao <nigel tao myrealbox com>]

> Like I posted earlier, bookmarks should be regarded as user data, not as 
> properties of a browser.

I imagine that the ideal solution is for various available browsers to
share a common bookmarks repository.  Whether that is a freedesktop.org
standard, or a GNOME standard (e.g. backed by evolution-data-server), or
whatever is another matter.

However, this will be difficult to put into practice, for a number of
reasons, including inertia.  For example, Firefox runs on both GNOME and
non-GNOME platforms, and it is simpler (= less bugs likely) and easier
for Firefox bookmarks to be in the same format (although in different
file locations) on Linux/GNOME as on Windows, rather than using e-d-s on
GNOME and something else on Linux/KDE.

I think that the creators of XBEL had imagined it to be a universal
bookmarks format (and it is used by Galeon and Konqueror).  But to date,
there hasn't been the pressing use case for all other browsers to
standardize on bookmarks.


> Good or not, it's a fact of life that people will try and use multiple 
> browsers, for whatever reason.

My intuition is that almost always, people will use only one browser
(heck, some people think that "Internet Explorer" is "The Web").  If
people use more than one browser, they will have a preferred browser
(call it "Browser A"), and use a secondary browser ("Browser B") for a
small number of specific sites (e.g. sites are 'broken' on Browser A) or
for a specific technical purpose (e.g. I am a web designer and I want to
test my site under different layout engines).

If you need to synchronize your bookmarks from A with your bookmarks
from B, then that could possibly be a separate program.  For example, a
very quick google for "Syncasaurus" seemed to indicate that someone had
previously tried something in a similar vein.  Alternatively, this XBEL
page ( http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/ ) gives a link to a
script that converts Opera bookmarks to XBEL.  Conceivably, you could
write a program to read the bookmarks from browsers A, B, C and D, merge
them, somehow weed out duplicates (and having some policy for non-exact
duplicates, like same URL different Title, or same URL filed under
different categories), and writing out the merged bookmarks to A, B, C
and D's file format and location.  Or, some browsers support manual
export and import of bookmarks, if synchronization is an infrequent
operation.

With regards to my applet, synchronization (or trying to merge multiple
bookmark repositories) seems to be a task for another program, if
necessary at all.  It would require a number of configuration
preferences over and above the current count of zero, in order to try to
please everybody.  And remember still that my applet is not the only way
to launch a bookmark sitting in a non-preferred browser's repository.
If you absolutely need to open URL X specifically with Browser B, then
you can still launch Browser B normally and access its bookmarks menu
normally.


Cheers,
Nigel.