representation of URLs in file system?

[Mark Shepard <mns-gnome MetaThink COM>]

Dear Gnome Developers-

Excuse me if I'm asking a FAQ, but how does one drag-n-drop Netscape
URLs to a gnome (actually, gmc) folder, and is there a simple method
(say, via a perl script) to convert a Netscape bookmarks.html file
into ``gnome URL objects'' (I don't know the correct term) in a
file system?

My goal is to be able to use a file system browser (gmc) instead
of Netscape's built-in bookmark function, and to store my bookmarks such
that each single bookmark is a first-class filesystem object.  This
would let me use one UI (gmc, or whatever) to browse both downloaded
documents/files _and_ bookmarks -- currently these two things
(docs/files vs. bookmarks) are maintained in separate-but-parallel
structures.  I also hoped that making URL's first-class filesystem
objects would allow using ordinary tools like "rsync" or "mirror" to
synchronize URL lists between laptop and desktop (I'm already using
these tools for file-synchronization, so again, it's one less UI to
deal with).

>From my casual observations, gnome seemed to represent URL's as
files with contents of the form "URL: http://blah/blah/blah", so I
figured I just needed to write a perl script to parse a bookmarks.html
file and generate a directory hierarchy containing files of this
format, one per bookmark.  Didn't work.  While D-n-D from Netscape
to the desktop works, D-n-D'ing a URL from Netscape to an open gmc
folder results in a regular file (no "URL"/Earth icon) with a name
like "urlK63123"...  Apparently gnome or gmc requires some magic metadata
be associated with these files in order to "bless" them as URLs as
opposed to plain files... true?  From the mail-archives this metadata
seems to be centralized in ~/.gnome/metadata.db.

So, assuming I've understood everything correctly, what's the best
way to (1) use gmc to "manage" my bookmarks as well as my files
and directories -- it'd be convenient to be able to drag URLs from
Netscape to gmc folders and be able to "launch" URLs in a gmc
folder by double-click or whatever; and (2) be able to use standard
Unix tools to archive, copy or synchronize these gmc-managed URLs
between multiple machines, same as I would any other file or directory?

I can think of several hacks to achieve part of this -- for instance,
represent each URL as a short shell script which simply passes the URL off
to a browser... But that's obviously a kludge, and doesn't allow convenient
d-n-d _from_ Netscape.

I'm running gnome-1.0.0, gnomemc-4.5.31, gnomecore-1.0.5, & gnomelibs-1.0.9.

Thanks in advance!
	Mark
	mns@metathink.com