Bundles, Thoughts about files

[Mildred]

Hi,

For a long time I have an idea about bookmarks. I would like to manage
my bookmarks in the regular filesystem. As someone said once (I forgot
who and where), why have multiple hierarchies ?

Actually, we often have folders in our filesystem for regular files, we
generally also have multiples folders in our mail user agent, and we
also have a hierarchy of "folders" in our browser to manage our
bookmarks. I think the ideal would be to have everything in one place,
there you could put any of your mails in any folder along with the
others document you have, and the same for bookmarks.

That way, your mail user agent would decompose in 4 softwares :
- a plugin for your file manager to view mail files
- a mail reader/writer that allow you to read a mail and compose mails
- a mail fetcher that would put in your filesystem incoming messages
- a mail sender to send mails to your SMTP server.

But I wouldn't want to talk about that.

My idea is to be able to put bookmarks along with other files in the
regular filesystem. And because I just went somewhere where I do not
have an Internet connexion, I would like to store with bookmarks a
copy of the webpage. So I could still view it offline.

Actually, I can store my bookmarks in the file system (I drag and drop
from epiphany to nautilus) and I get a .desktop file. But there is no
cache of the webpage and I have to store it separately.

So I would like to define a new format that would store a bookmark and
the webpage in the same file. My first idea is to store the webpage in
a file (exactly the same as the "save" function of my browser) but
setting an extanded attribute to give the address of the webpage.

But because extended attributes are not relyable, I have to fine
another solution. So you can imagine to store the URL in the same file
as the cached webpage. It could be a good idea but I don't like it that
much


So I thought about bundles. That would be a general purpose to the
unrelyability of the extended attributes. So what do I cann a bundle ?
I took this idea from Mac OS X but you can also find it on GNUstep and
maybe ROX (I don't know). A bundle is a folder containing multiple
files gathered together in one entity. The bundle is seen as one object
in the filemanager and don't look like a filder. Double-clicking on it
don't open it like a folder but open it like a file. The filebrowser
must syill have the possibility to open it like a folder and
view/modify its content.

So I would suggest to create a specification (if not already done, as I
said I had no Internet connexion so no way to check it out) for
bundles. Maybe it should be inspired from the Mac OS X / OpenStep
bundles. I think also that a bundle should contain a desktop file that
would specify metadata about the bundle like for example the filetype
of the bundle. And maybe we should specify name of some extended
attributes a bundle could have to simplify some operation (I don't know
them anways)

That's my today idea ...
Any thoughts about it ?

Thanks

Mildred


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