Re: Trailblazer

[Stefan Rotsch <linux stefanrotsch de>]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 18:02 -0400, Adam Hooper wrote:

> Anyway, obviously it'd be cool if we could bring some of this history
> searching into Epiphany. I'd say the most important feature is indexing
> of all pages (for full-text searches); slightly less important is the
> thumbnailing of web pages. Naturally, this could start out as an
> extension and then eventually be wrapped into Epiphany in the next
> release or two if it turns out to be easy to use and indispensable.
Adding thumbnail support seems to be the simplest task, even if we stick
with history's xml format: put a thumbnail in ~/.thumbnails and add a
new <property /> to one page's node pointing to the thumbnail. Only
needs some research what would be the most efficient way for taking
thumbnails (maybe take a look hat how Konqueror does this), and maybe a
configurable history size to prevent ~/.thumbnails from getting too
large.

When I first read about Trailblazer I thought about if it would be
possible to achieve some of it's goals by extending the history file we
already have. As mentioned above, it seems to be quite simple to add a
thumbnail for each visited web page. It's also possible to add
<property>s containing a description and/or keywords; in a second step
we could also move the history's format to RDF and use Dublin Core [1],
eg. dc:subject (meta-data) and dc:description (first paragraph/content).

Using this, it also seems possible to get a graphical history with quite
low effort. But enabling full-text search on the history file would
definitely need a database/indexer engine, as you already mentioned.

When storing history by using RDF, we could also think about using query
stuff like SquishQL [2] or RDFStore [3] for enabling full-text search on
the history file. But this would add external dependencies we can avoid
with using Medusa or even gnome-db.

Just some random thougths...
Stefan

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/
[2] http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rdfquery/
[3] http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net/