Re: [Epiphany] Bookmarks system

[Xan Lopez <xan masilla org>]

Ok, this is going to be the mother of all flamewars ;)

El dom, 09 de 03 de 2003 a las 21:11, Marco Pesenti Gritti escribió:
> As follow up of the bookmarks discussion I decide to write a short
> analisys of the debated issues. I believe they are somewhat related, so
> it can be good to discuss them together.I'm using the term "topic" here
> as a substitute of keyword, that sounded a bit crack.
> Uhm it's long, hope it's not too boring ;)
> 
> TOPICS (VS TOPIC)
> 
> Epiphany provides the ability to associate a bookmark to multiple
> topics.
> Let's take one of my bookmarks as an example.
> 
> http://mpt.phrasewise.com/ (for who does not know, it's the blog of
> Matthew Thomas, a guy interested in usability problems).
> 
> In epiphany I associated it to two topics: "Usability" and "Blogs".
> In another bookmarks system I should have put it in my Usability folder
> or in the Blogs folder (or in both using aliases).
> 
> I think this works better when the user has to browse bookmarks and find
> it. I can think to two situations that makes me access that site.
> 
> - Everyday I have a look to blogs of people I'm interested to. So I open
> the dialog, look in the main list for the word "mpt". When I have many
> bookmarks I cant find it immediately. I switch my eyes to the keywords
> list looking for something that remind me what I'm willing to browse
> (people blogs). If I fail or take some time to find the
> topic/category/folder where the site I'm looking is stored I'm a bit
> irritated: it would have been simpler to just type mpt in the
> autocompletion or in the search entry of the bookmarks dialog.
> 
> - Sometimes I have an usability doubt and I remember Matthew has
> something to say about that (or simply I hope he has and I go to search
> about it). In this case looking at the topics list it would be hard for
> me to catch immediately the Blogs category, while Usability would get my
> attention immediately.
> I have the impression that bookmarks editor provide me a way to store my
> bookmarks in some static categories. When I look for it I'm supposed to
> something like Cat -> Animals. But things appear to be a bit more
> complex at least in my experience, the association never so direct. In
> this example the context can push my thoughts in different directions.
> 
> This is the main reason why I believe it works better for me. I'm basing
> this just on my experience. I'm obviously trying to abstract from it,
> but observing other people could help more.
> 
> The problems comes when adding and organizing bookmarks. The ability to
> provide several topics for each bookmark require a more complex
> interface than a single topic mode (basically a combo). There are some
> proposals in bugzilla but I'm not completely happy with any of them.
> Consider that make the bookmarks editor interface complex conflicts
> badly with the target of making it a way to fastly access bookmarks
> discussed later.
> 
> Finally the question here is: is that complexity worth ?
> 
> http://www.kaylon.com/why.html (this is an external bookmarks
> application for windows that use a similar concept)
> http://people.debian.org/~enrico/tagbk-draft.pdf (If I remember well
> there are some points against the bookmarks hierarchy in the first part
> of the document)

Without having read those links, I'll add my thoughts here too: first of
all, I don't even use the multiple topics per bookmark option, so
answering your last question, my first reaction would be "NO". But
probably lots of people will find it useful (perhaps even me in the
future), so it could be worth the effort of thinking a good UI to handle
this problem. My main objection is that whatever we finally decide, it
can't be too complex, because most probably we'll want to duplicate it
in the new bookmark dialog, and we don't want to completely clutter it.
We could just allow to relate a new filled bookmark with one topic
(which would seem more or less  natural), and then allow to add more in
the BE, but this is probably just crack.

Anyway, this is hard topic, I hope the UI experts can think about
something :)

> 
> BOOKMARKS DIALOG (VS BOOKMARKS MENU)
> 
> In epiphany the main way to browse bookmarks is supposed to be the
> dialog. I think submenus are hard to use, and things get worst while the
> bookmarks collection grows.
> A dialog, if kept very simple, can provide an easier way to find the
> bookmark you need: it's easier to use and more powerfull (contains for
> example search capabilities).
> Also I feel the ability to provide a flat list of most used bookmarks in
> the Go menu more useful than a dup of the session history.
> To avoid the conflict with people used to the menu, we could allow to
> drag All on the toolbars.
> 
> http://www.apple.com/safari/ (The bookmarks part)

I completely agree with you here, bookmarks menu have to die as the
principal way of accessing bookmarks. I'm for the idea of allowing DND
of bookmarks AND topics to the toolbar though, for fast access of
frequently visited webs.
> 
> DIALOG (VS TOPLEVEL WINDOW)
> 
> (Daveb, I'm replying to you here)
> 
> Looking to the bugs Dave is submitting, the real choice appear to be:
> open bookmarks from a central place that you keep open while browsing or
> provide a way to open bookmarks in the current window.
> The way Dave is proposing to browse here is more or less:
> Open the bookmarks dialog, double click on a bookmark that will open a
> new window, read, close window, switch back to bookmarks editor ...
> Is the analisys correct?
> 
> My impression is that this is more complex than "Open a new window and
> select the page you want to open there" and less consistent with the
> normal way of opening urls (is this a problem though ?).
> In general I think it would make more sense to implement this at desktop
> level. (but cant nautilus already act like that ?).

I think the BE should be a top level window, but I don't agree with your
idea of how browsing would be with it being that way. My normal way of
browsing is more like the second you describe, but I'd find useful in
certain situations to be able to keep the BE opened while I browser a
web, and being the BE a dialog make this extremely unpleasant.

> 
> Marco
> 
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"The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages -- as if
the savages weren't dangerous enough already" [Edward Abbey]

xan, xan@masilla.org