About Bookmarks and Categories

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

I have a few questions about bookmarks and categories, which I hope
can be answered. I've been trying out and playing with a lot of
things, among them the bookmarks system, adding a few sites here and
there as you do. And I started to wonder: what's so great about topics
instead of hierarchies? I know it's been popular in mail programs and
online artickes among other things for quite a while, but is it really
better?

http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany_2fFrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-b75c89acfc35a8bac2b5dfb734ac6775262313ac
says:

"The traditional way of organizing bookmarks is too complicated for
average users. Assigning topics to bookmarks instead of hierarchical
folders is more intuitive. This means a few differences to traditional
bookmarks systems:"

The condescending words about average users aside, I would like to
request an explanation on how this is more intiutive and furthermore,
what benefits it gives. The simplistic behaviour of picking *one*
folder and sticking your data in it seems to be the most intiutive to
me. There isn't much to be confused about then.

I can get pretty annoyed in for instance gmail when the only way to
say that a mail is from my school, and about the education in general,
and another mail is also from my school but about a certain class - is
to mark up with several labels, or create separate labels for all
these cases. Actually, I have to create completely separate labels,
because the quick-links only allow to select one label at the time.

Maybe it would work if the menus allowed to *easily* search on
multiple criteria at once. In a way, that's what a hierarchy does.
Frankly, I've been trying to come up with examples where I would like
to reach a bookmark in several ways, and not coming up with a single
one. Plenty of examples on when I'd just put it in one top level box
though, and a few where it'd make sense to have sublevels to that one.
Say "development/web", "development/epiphany" etc. Those don't make
enough sense with the topics "development" and "web" all by
themselves, it's the combination that does it.

Also, I tried to bookmark a site in FF and one in Epiphany, and well,
frankly, there isn't really much difference in interface. You are
provided with a top level simple list in both cases, but in FF you can
go "advanced" and access the tree view if you wish. You don't need to
go deeper, but you can. OTOH, you can't mark several directories.

Well, enough ranting, the reason I wrote this was to ask other list
members for some good, real life examples on multiple topic use that
makes sense. Also to see if I've missed something about how this is
supposed to be used, and if there are plans to support some kind of
multiple qualification that *is* better than hierarchies - if so it'd
of course be a good thing. =)

Please, enlighten me.

-- 
Kristoffer Lundén
☎ 0704 48 98 77
✉ kristoffer lunden gmail com
ICQ: 618 289 83
http://www.gamemaker.nu/