[XML-SIG] Metadata in XBEL

[David Faure]

Hello everyone,

First, I'm glad that Galeon uses XBEL too, I didn't know that.

> 1) icon for bookmark
> 2) toolbar for folder

Those are the two things I asked for in XBEL too. Good to see
it will be in the 1.1 version of the spec. However there is a small
concern about how icons are designated - as usual between
KDE and Gnome, since the same problem exists in the .desktop files.

The way it currently works in Konqueror is the following.
 <bookmark icon="www" href="http://www.kde.org/" >
  <title>KDE Home Page</title>
 </bookmark>

The icon is an attribute of the bookmark element, and of the folder element,
and 
* either the icon name is the base name of a globally
available icon; no extension is written, and no directory either.
The icon loading looks for icons of that name + ".png" or ".xpm",
under the standard (for KDE) directories, e.g. /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/*/
This makes it possible to have a different icon for 8-bit displays
(locolor instead of hicolor), and gives access to different icon sizes.
* or the icon name is like "favicons/www-1.ibm.com" to designate a
"favourite icon" for a given site, which has been stored under the
~/.kde/share/icons/favicons/ directory (with .png appended).
* obviously full paths are supported too.

I realize that all this is very hard to standardize !!

The only practical solution is to add the search paths of the other
environment in each, as was done for .desktop files. But that doesn't
consistute a clean spec. I'm afraid I have no solution to offer,
I guess I'm just pointing out that sharing the same attribute might
not be enough for users to use the same bookmark collection with
both browsers.

I saw in another mail on the subject, this piece of XML :
 > <site ...>
  >   <info>
  >     <metadata owner="http://galeon.sourceforge.net">
  >       <pixmap>/home/users/ross/pictures/slashdot.org</pixmap>
  >       <toolbar>true</toolbar>
  >     </metadata>
  >   </info>
  > </site>
Is this a concrete case of XML used by Galeon, or is it more like a
theorical example ?
I'm surprised by <site>, <info> etc. Is that part of XBEL ?
I guess not :)
Surely jumping in the middle of a discussion doesn't help :-)
Anyway, back to the icon issue, this seems to suggest that Galeon
uses full paths ?

> 3) notes on bookmark
That, and many other things associated with bookmarks, will end
up being necessary.
Juergen (who plans to contribute to Konqueror's bookmarks) mentionned
scoring: "to give the site a score (of out 10, for example)... then you could 
search for "linux kde development" with a score >= 7 for example".
Especially useful if merging is done, see end of mail.

Other things that users mentionned were: list of keywords
(still for searches), and, hmm, how often a given bookmark was
visited. Not very important, given that we still don't support the
added/visited/modified dates yet.

> 4) nick-name (shortcut name for typing into location box)
Interesting idea :)
In fact this is possible in Konqueror, but via a separate module 
(the "short-URI filter"), so it's currently unrelated with bookmarks.

One often requested feature, is for merging. For instance, in a company,
there could be a "company-global" set of bookmarks, to be merged with
the user's bookmarks - much like everything else in KDE already has
a global and a local directory, possibly with even more levels (e.g. for
groups of people).
To make that possible, XBEL could have a sort of "include this other
bookmark collection" tag, and it could be up to the application to create
aliases towards those global bookmarks in the user's bookmark file.
Well, that's just one solution - it allows to change the order, to remove
a global bookmark, to insert its own anywhere... but it doesn't notice new
bookmarks in the global collection, unless some timestamp is used.

Another way could be that including another set of bookmarks simply means
that all those bookmarks appear first, then those in the user's file.
This way, changes to the global collection are automatically taken into account,
but it's impossible to modify/remove/reorder/change anything in the global
collection. It's probably much easier to implement too, and has the exact semantic
of a #include. I suggest to add this to XBEL then: a simple 
<include href="file:/path/to/bookmarks/collection.xml">.
There's still the issue of relative paths vs absolute paths, but, well... 
no solution here either :}


In summary, despite the compatibility problem with icon names (and paths),
I'm very happy if icon="..." and toolbar="yes" are added to XBEL
(given that Konqueror already uses those), I suggest to add an <include>
possibility, and the few other things that are not in XBEL and that might 
be in konqueror one day (keywords, scoring), can certainly be done as 
konq-specific metadata - unless others want to share the same data.

-- 
David FAURE, david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://perso.mandrakesoft.com/~david/, http://www.konqueror.org/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today