Desktop Emblems Proposed Spec

[John Stowers]

Greetings,

I am hacking on adding tagging support to Nautilus using Tracker [1].
I have come across an area which I think warrants standardization
between desktops.

Nautilus currently has the concept of an emblem, which is a tag with
an associated image. However it stores these privately and does not
offer any further granularity regarding presenting these to users.
Furthermore these emblems, once defined in nautilus, cannot be applied
or accessed using other applications.

Note that I am talking about user defned emblems, which is a superset
of the emblem-* icons defined in the icon-theme spec.

To address this, and some other limitations I wrote up a small
specification [2] for an Emblem file, which is a simple variation on
.desktop files.

I would appreciate hearing the thoughts of other file manager, desktop
indexer, and metadata storage system authors on the spec.

John

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Tracker
[2] http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/wiki/index.php/Freedesktop_Emblem_Spec