[PROPOSAL] Desktop Bookmarks

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 10 May 2005 19:21, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 May 2005 17:35, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > On 5/10/05, Rodney Dawes <dobey at novell.com> wrote:
> > > Another benefit of using .desktop files, is that it makes it easy to
> > > put a single bookmark icon on your desktop, or the panel, or to send
> > > it off in an e-mail to someone.
> >
> > On the other hand, loading bookmarks from single files could become a
> > real pain (latency-wise), when you reach more than, say 250 bookmarks.
> 
> Storing each bookmark in its own file and then loading 250 files would be much 
> slower than loading one big file I think.

That's even for sure. Been there, done that. KDE-1 and early KDE-2 versions used
.kdelnk/.desktop files for bookmarks, and it was slow and a hell to manage.
There's a reason we switched to XML (XBEL) since.

I like http://devel.emmanuelebassi.net/papers/bookmark-spec.html because
it makes it possible to reuse bookmarks code for handling recent files.

I don't get why it wants to store them into ~/.bookmarks though, if this
isn't about the main (web) bookmarks collection but only about local-file-browsing?
It gets confusing if people assume the web bookmarks (usually called just "bookmarks"
will be there).

"Replace the Recent Files Storage Specification, providing a single specification for both bookmarks and recent files"
sounds good, but both files should still be separated. There's a difference between
a set of bookmarks that the user has set himself, and the "recent files" list that is
automatically updated.
So there should be a local-bookmarks and a recent-files file that use that spec.
And I guess $HOME itself isn't the best location when XDG already defines
the proper dirs for such things (but I don't remember the details of that spec
to suggest something concrete).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).