Re: Bookmark Patch Praise, Suggestion

[Britt Selvitelle <mbs uky edu>]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 11:24 +1000, Peter Harvey wrote:
> I see your point, and in many instances it would be nice to have. It was
> actually the original idea proposed by Eric Newman (which my patch tries
> to realise). His mockup is still online. I probably wouldn't make the
> headings as large, but you get the idea.
>   http://webpages.charter.net/hick_ninja/epiphany_menu_after.png

Yes, I think something like this, but slightly more subtle would be very
nice imo.

> It does have some disadvantages though. Consider this example from my
> own bookmarks. Should there be a title above the 'Constraints Journal'
> bookmark? Is it necessary? How do we made that decision?
>   http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/~harvey/epiphany/Research.png

In the case of one bookmark named after the topic, I think this is
unavoidable.

> I'll also give the more formal explanation of why I've avoided creating
> titles for subdivisions. First, this patch is based on my understanding
> of Formal Concept Analysis, in which we define a 'concept' by:
>       * a collection of attributes (called topics in Epiphany) and
>       * a collection of objects (called bookmarks in Epiphany)
> 
> Formal Concept Analysis says that, given a collection of attributes
> (four legs, bites, barks, hairy) you can identify the concept 'dog'.
> Similarly, given a collection of objects (Fido, Lassie, Snoopy) you can
> also identify the concept 'dog'.

This makes sense, but I don't think it should apply as strictly here.
The problem that I see is that bookmarks are supposed to provide an easy
way to quickly find old data. Given the principals of Formal Concept
Analysis, yes, I could probably figure out the topic based on the
bookmark names, but do we want to demand that users stop and think that
much about every topic? This would make reading through your bookmarks
much slower in my opinion, especially if you are looking at poorly named
categories that you may or may not have interacted with in a long time.

> In Epiphany I assume that each bookmark is sufficiently well named that
> you can identify the concept that a collection of bookmarks belong to
> *without* a heading. By that reasoning, my answer would be to rename
> your bookmarks so that you can identify the concept (in this case FFTA).
> Sorry!

This would demand that people do more work (in many cases much more) in
order to maintain this system though. Do we want that? (Certainly lots
of pages will have titles that do not represent precisely the topic you
have filed them within).

Again, the patch is already very nice ... keep up the great work!

-- 
Britt Selvitelle <mbs uky edu>