Re: [Usability] Re: [Epiphany] epiphany toolbar/bookmarks

[Stephen Blake <seb iostream org>]

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 14:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 05:48:17PM +0200, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote: 
> >  > - Searches are currently not very "rich", so if you have 2000
> >  > bookmarks, it can be hard to find them. But on the long time a
> >  > database approach is obviously the best also for people with so many
> >  > bookmarks.
> > 
> >  With a large collection there's another problem: the list of topics is
> >  also potentially large.  Just finding a topic is in itself a difficult
> >  task.  I'm not sure if there's a solution for this problem (other than
> >  just "that's your problem, think of better topics" -- well, I'm not a
> >  librarian, ook?)
> 
> It seems like there might be some cheesy hack to allow topics to be
> hierarchized; for example, I can imagine creating topics with "/" in
> the name:
>  
>  Foo/Bar
>  Foo/Baz
> 
> Would it be a total hack if that was magically used to generate
> submenus? Probably so. ;-)

How about a not-so-cheesy tree hack solution: Imagine the following list
of bookmarks and their categories (with apologies to any BSD zealots out
there ;) ):

Slashdot: News, Zealotry
OSNews: News, Operating Systems
FreeBSD: Operating Systems, Zealotry
CNN: News

I can imagine the following (but not the only) tree we could generate
from this (monospaced font required), where a * is a bookmark.

All
  +- News
  |    +- Zealotry
  |    |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- * OSNews
  |    +- * CNN
  +- Zealotry
  |    +- News
  |    |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- Operating Systems
  |    |    +- * FreeBSD
  |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- * FreeBSD
  +- Operating Systems
       +- Zealotry
       |    +- * FreeBSD
       +- * OSNews
       +- * FreeBSD

Hmm, too complicated? Maybe. Too many duplicate entries? Perhaps. But
maybe it's a start. Maybe we eliminate the (possibly very large)
intersection lists, forcing the user to navigate to the most specific
instance, i.e.:

All
  +- News
  |    +- Zealotry
  |    |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- * OSNews
  |    +- * CNN
  +- Zealotry
  |    +- News
  |    |    +- * Slashdot
  |    +- Operating Systems
  |    |    +- * FreeBSD
  +- Operating Systems
       +- Zealotry
       |    +- * FreeBSD
       +- * OSNews

Well, it's obviously not a fully baked idea, but what do you think?

Stephen