Desktop Bookmark Spec: Extensions/Clarifications

[nf2]

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-bookmark-spec

This is about standardizing and sharing file-management shortcuts - 
custom links that get listed in the side-pane of file-managers and 
file-dialogs - in Gnome also in places/bookmarks and nautilus/bookmarks. 
For KDE i already did some work on the KBookmark system to make this 
possible (The next step would be pointing KFilePlacesModel to the right 
path, and moving the list of "root"-items to a different storage - in 
KDE they are not hard-coded like in Gnome).

Both desktops already have XBEL libraries for managing bookmarks, but 
there are still some open questions:


1) Location/Name of the file:

$XDG_DATA_DIR/shortcuts.xbel as Emmanuele Bassi suggested? Perhaps 
renaming it to filemgr-shortcuts.xbel?

2) Change notification:

KDE uses DBus signals for bookmark change notification. Would it be 
possible for Gnome/GTK to send a DBus signal after editing the bookmarks 
file? Or should we add a new option to KBookmarkManager to monitor the 
bookmark file on the file-system when dealing with shared bookmarks.

3) Icons:

KDE allows to pick custom icons for bookmarks. Rather than full paths to 
icons it uses "named icons". I have a patch for KBookmark to store the 
icon-name in the metadata:

   <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org" >
    <bookmark:icon name="folder-red" />
   </metadata>
 
This would add another (optional) attribute to the icon element: "name" 
(At the moment only "type" and "href" are in the spec)

4) Mime-Type

File-management shortcuts don't really need the mime-type set, because 
they only point to folders (would always be "inode/directory" anyway).

5) Groups:

File-management shortcuts can't have nested groups (both KDE and Gnome 
use "flat" lists for this purpose). I guess this should also be 
mentioned in the spec.


Regards,
Norbert