[Epiphany] Re: "Dynamic sub topics" (bookmark system suggestion)

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Daniel Borgmann writes: 

> Hello, 
> 
> I was thinking about the issues that the current bookmark system has for
> users with lots of bookmarks (not me) due to the lack of a hierachy. 
> 
> How about a system that combines the merits of both? If I understand the
> complaints about the new system correctly, the main issue is, that you
> can't have quick access to your bookmarks anymore if you have too many.
> An example would be that you have about 80 bookmarks in "News" and 120
> bookmarks in "Computer". Finding what you are looking for would be hell
> now, unless you can somehow narrow down the selection to "News &
> Computer" (which might only contain a small subset, like 20 bookmarks).
> Obvious ways to make this possible would be to improve the locationbar
> entry (case insensitive and allowing to type multiple topics in
> arbitrary order) and to allow multiple selections of topics (using CTRL)
> in the bookmarks dialog. Both aren't very easy to understand and not
> necessarily efficient, so my main suggestion is something different:
> How about allowing to narrow down a selection using the dropdown menus
> on the bookmarks toolbar? For example if you have a bookmark in the
> "Computer" and "News" topics, you could click the "News" topic and it
> would show you the category "Computer" as a subtopic, if you click the
> "Computer" topic, it would show you "News" as a subtopic. This way, if
> you have too many bookmarks in one category, you could narrow down the
> selection while browsing but it wouldn't matter where you start and you
> wouldn't _have_ to do this because it would still show all bookmarks of
> your current topic selection below the "sub topics" (maybe it should
> only show bookmarks which aren't further categorized if there are too
> many though... no point in showing 600 bookmarks in a dropdown menu). It
> wouldn't change a thing if you put each bookmark into just one category.
> The result should be a system that is still very simple but scales up to
> even much more complex usages without introducing the problems of
> traditional hierachies, like having to remember weither you have stored
> something in "News -> Computer" or in "Computer -> News". 
> 
> I'm sorry if this was already discussed and rejected, I think it could
> be a good solution though. What do you think about it? 
> 
> Daniel 
> 
> 
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Just wanted to reply and let you know that the suggestion may be a good idea 
and is definately something to think about. 

The major issue with bookmarks (and file systems in general) is providing 
the user with an easy to use search interface. The epiphany system currently 
is really simple here, it provides searching by topic, name and address. 
Ideally this needs to be expanded to allow searching based on more verbose 
search phrases such as "All bookmarks from the last two weeks" or "All sites 
I visited over a month ago" etc. Just examples though. This is a very 
difficult problem and really extends more generally to the filesystem as 
well. 

All that said, imo the bookmarks editor (window whatever you want to call 
it) really provides a much more easy to use and significantly better 
interface than the traditional hierarichal bookmarks system. For the time 
being i don't think we should do much in the way of ui churn here at all. 
The goal right now is to stabalize and release 1.0 imo. 

dave