[Epiphany] Multiple keywords are crack?

[Andrew Burrow <albcorp internode on net>]

Hi all,

congratulations on Epiphany.  Just installed it from Debian Sid this
week.


I am very fired up about the bookmarks.  When I saw the beautiful
bookmarks dialog, I thought for a moment that someone had finally got
it, and that we could dispense with the fantasy of tree structured
hierarchy.  Jamie Zawinski fired a notable salvo in 1998 with

        http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html

So I naively posted a wishlist bug concerning multiple keywords.

        http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110841

The meat of the proposition is that the 'Keywords' and 'Search' elements
of the bookmarks dialog should work orthogonally.  Extending the
keywords selector to enable multiple selections enables the user to find
bookmarks by the intersection of keywords.  This is an affordance ---
something that most any sophisticated user would eventually just try.  I
did after about 20 minutes.  The remainder would live in blissful
ignorance of the feature, since single selections behave EXACTLY the
sames as the present form.


However, this is something that everyone who is even remotely likely to
use Gnome already does.  As long ago as 2001, 75% of all web search
queries used three or more terms.  Source

        http://www.traffick.com/story/searchengines/020204_positiontech.asp

So, I would say that Google has accustomed users to the idea of
narrowing by conjunction.  Consider http://www.googlewhack.com/


On the other hand, the tab completion of keywords in the search field
does not improve usability.  Why would any user expect to type keywords
in a search form sitting adjacent to a keywords list?  For one thing, it
makes the keyword list 100% redundant --- like a door with two handles. 
Presenting an entire 'Keywords' list, rather than a drop down, suggests
selecting conjunctions; and a 'Search' field suggests full text
indexing.

As an alternative, why not index the text of the bookmarks and complete
on any word?  Even then conjunction is possible --- there is no
difficulty in completing whitespace separated terms, it has been in the
command line for how many years?


In Galeon, I used an anti-symmetric hierarchy of bookmarks.  All
bookmarks in leaf folders, the first leaf folders at depth 1, remaining
leaf folders at depth 2.

        |
        +-- shallow leaf folder 1
        |
        +-- shallow leaf folder 2
        |
        +-- branch folder 1
        |    |
        |    +-- deep leaf folder 1
        |    |
        |    +-- deep leaf folder 2

It worked well, but was hard work to design.  In Epiphany, I ended up
with 40 keywords and no structure to assist in their navigation.  I
estimate that I could use 10 keywords if intersection was supported, so
that my whole system would fit in that neat little bookmarks dialog
without even scrolling! Designing it would be as easy as writing the
page I made for my research time tracking.

        http://zwiki.sial.rmit.edu.au/albCorpus/TimeTrackerCategories


Sadly, I am going to be away over Easter.  Still if anyone bites, I'd be
happy to discuss it.


Cheers


Andrew

-- 
Andrew Burrow <albcorp@internode.on.net>