Feature Request: subtopics, bookmarks metadata

[Gerardo Ballabio <g ballabio cineca it>]

Hi all,
I've recently migrated from Galeon to Epiphany (on occasion of my
migration from Debian stable to testing), and I'm currently facing its
(in)famous bookmarks system.

I like it. The "bookmark can belong to multiple topics" feature and the
search bar are both advancements beyond the traditional hierarchical
system, in my opinion.
I have several hundreds of bookmarks (I've an habit -- or is it a
compulsive syndrome -- of bookmarking everything that catches my
attention "just in case"), and searching for something down the tree in
Galeon wasn't always easy.

However, having that many bookmarks, I feel that the single-level-deep
hierarchy enforced by Epiphany is also limiting. I must choose between
having too many bookmarks per topic, or too many topics (or both).
In a computer scientist's language: that doesn't scale well with the
number of bookmarks.

I've conceived a couple of ways to make the Epiphany bookmarks system
more effective (in my humble opinion, at least):

1) topics should be allowed to contain other topics, as well as
bookmarks.

That would allow one to build a hierarchy of topics of any depth (and
(s)he wouldn't be limited to a strict tree structure -- topics may
belong to multiple topics, or even to each other), while at the same
time, those who prefer the current single-level hierarchy could just
leave all topics uncategorized, and everything would be exactly as it is
now.
I believe that that would bring us "the best of both worlds", and
hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Note: for that to work as intended, a topic should _not_ automatically
contain the bookmarks contained by its subtopics.

2) the searching feature is also rather limited, in my opinion. As I
understand, the search is only performed on the bookmarks' titles, which
in turn are copied from the titles of web pages; and those aren't always
very self-explanatory.
As an illustration, here are some bookmarks of mine:

"CAMPOS"            (what is CAMPOS?)
"Berniw's Homepage" (who, or what is Berniw?)
"CSST Home Page"    (see above)
"Swox AB"           (excuse me?)
"NEST at SNS"       (whaaaAAAAt?!?!?)
"Epiphany"          (and what the HECK is Epiphany? ;-P )

In short, you are only going to find something when you already know its
name. That isn't what I call "searching". That's traversing an
alphabetical index, at best.

To make for a real, powerful search, bookmarks should contain some
metadata to indicate what they are really about.
Of course that wouldn't be really effective without some way of actually
_getting_ the metadata (maybe someone could write an Epiphany Extension
to extract keywords from web pages?), but the functionality should be
there -- at least, one could enter keywords manually.

I would appreciate very much if you could consider my suggestions. I
believe that they would add useful functionality to Epiphany, without
adding any configuration option ;-).

Thank you all for your excellent work.
 Gerardo

Dr. Gerardo Ballabio
c/o CINECA - Sistemi ad Alte Prestazioni
via Magnanelli 6/3
I-40033 Casalecchio di Reno (Italy)
tel. +39/0516171722
E-mail: g ballabio cineca it

P.S.: I must say that my version of Epiphany isn't very current. It's
the version now in Debian testing, namely, version 1.0.6.
Maybe the features I'm asking for have already been added? Looking at
the release notes of newer versions, I don't see any indication of that.

P.P.S.: while I'm at it: when you release a new major version, like
1.2.0, you should really list what's new since the previous stable
branch -- not just since the latest development version!