Desktop Emblems Proposed Spec

[John Stowers]

> Another thing you don't seem to have covered. How would an application
> determine what files have emblem X? Or how do an app set emblem X on a file
> (or generally an uri)?

Yeah I have intentionally left that out - in this proposal. I tried to
elaborate a bit in the section on "Relationship to tags" to clarify
this spec only covers the definition of emblems.

While that might make this spec a bit simple I see it as a necessary
first step. To be honest I was going to see how Wasapi pans out and
then start to think about a common DBus API for associating metadata
with files at a later date. Such an api could be

AttachKeyword(keyword, uri)
AttachEmblem(emblem, uri)
etc

I do believe that this spec would form a necessary basis for such an
API (in the emblem case), or could at least be absorbed by that spec
at a subsequent date

I think that standardising on the emblems first, and then an API for
associating them with files is about as far as you can go for
standardising tags/keywords/emblems and stuff. I believe it would be
prohibitively restrictive, performance wise, to require indexers also
keep a (hypothetical) xml file describing the association of all
emblems to files, in addition to their own internal representations of
such relationships [1]

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts

John

[1] Perhaps the answer here is standardising on something like XMP
sidecar files and having indexers periodically write these out to
disk. In that case they would no doubt need to refer back to an emblem
which may have been applied to the associated file.