Desktop usability issues: some comments from the country of bears, vodka and ISO8859-5

[nf2]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:48 PM, A. Walton<awalton at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 9:11 AM, nf2<nf2.email at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Sergey
>> Udaltsov<sergey.udaltsov at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> There is one closely related issue - the bookmarking mechanism, used
>>> in these dialogs, should be standardized as well.
>>
>> There actually is a spec for this and I implemented it for KDE. It
>> just hasen't been implemented by GTK yet. AFAIK the problem is the
>> lack of an appropriate XML parser in the stack below GTK and GLIB
>> (GIO).
>
> Would that be GMarkup and the corresponding GBookmarkFile? It
> certainly sounds like it... We don't currently use it for storing
> "Places', but we have a bug(s?) open towards moving that direction[1].

As far as i remember the problem with GBookmarkFile is that it does
not preserve "private" metadata nodes which are needed by KDE (see the
example below). Preserving those metadata nodes would probably require
a DOM parser, which is not available inside GLib. Parhaps the
GBookmarkFile implementation should become a dlopened plugin which
links something like libxml2, but i don't know if that would be
possible.

-------- ~/.local/share/user-places.xbel ---------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xbel>
<xbel xmlns:bookmark="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-bookmarks"
xmlns:mime="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"
xmlns:kdepriv="http://www.kde.org/kdepriv" >
 <bookmark href="file:///bigtemp" >
  <title>bigtemp</title>
  <info>
   <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org" >
    <bookmark:icon name="inode-directory" />
   </metadata>
   <metadata owner="http://www.kde.org" >
    <ID>1248471539/0</ID>
   </metadata>
  </info>
 </bookmark>
</xbel>
-------------------------------------------------------------

There seems to be another related bug:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556040

Cheers,
Norbert