Bookmarks shared among desktop environments

[Dave Cridland]

On Tue Apr 19 15:27:07 2005, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Dave Cridland wrote:
>> It's whether the API - and in particular the data model it 
>> encapsulates - should present structures or key/value.
> 
> Clearly we would have a API for structured data that would involve 
> arrays of some sort. However for the majority case where data 
> naturally fits the key/value form it makes sense to have a simple 
> API for that using strings (getkey/setkey). I see these types of 
> data as being very different and mixing them makes the API more 
> complex for the simple cases.

Ah... The getkey/setkey interface lives in libgconf, for instance. 
That exists already. Applications accessing simple preference data 
don't *need* to see structures at all.

But we do need special treatment for attributes, since different 
attributes have different security considerations - "Last Visited" on 
a bookmark is very much private data, whereas "URL" is not.

We can punt this to a distinct interface, of course - have the D-BUS 
preference interface be key/value, but provide a second interface 
that has the full data model. Initially, we just don't provide the 
second interface. However, the backends still need to handle 
structured data efficiently.

Dave.