Re: UMarks - a universal bookmark system.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for getting in touch. I hadn't heard of XBEL, so I have checked it
out in an attempt to answer your question.

Firstly, it looks like it has been some time since XBEL was updated. Much of
the documentation dates from 1998, and the last update to anything I could
find was 2002. It doesn't seem to be under active development.

Bookmarks have moved on since then, and this shows in the scope of XBEL. For
example it lacks support for favicons, keywords or summaries; most of which
are additions that have become more commonplace since the late 90's. There
is a <metadata> tag where one could ostensibly capture some of this mind
you.

I couldn't quite work out how a bookmark hierarchy was maintained, although
I assumed it was by creating a nested arrangement within the file itself.
Perfectly sensible, although UMarks attempts to avoid this by embedding
location info with each element itself, allowing for a relatively relaxed
file structure. For example, a new link could be added by just adding a
<link> tag at the end of the file, rather than trying to wedge it in to some
pre-existing structure.

Finally, the purpose of UMarks was to remove bookmarks from software
altogether, and to make it just a piece of data owned by a user. In a
unix-style system it might sit somewhere like ~/bookmarks. The idea is to
allow the same bookmarks file (on a local system) to be accessed by anything
that uses bookmarks i.e. the purpose was to view it as information owned by
a user, not something embedded within a browser that had to be exported to
other applications.

I hope this answers your query, and thanks for taking the time to respond,
it's greatly appreciated.

gdoc


On 02/09/2010 10:20, "Richard Light" <richard@light.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> In message <C8A4422F.6AFE%info@umarks.org>, UMarks <info@umarks.org>
> writes
>> Hello all,
>> 
>> I am a newbie with all things semantic web, so I am not sure if this is of
>> any interest to anyone, or if it?s inappropriate for this mailing list. My
>> apologies if so.
>> 
>> UMarks is an open bookmark format intended to replace current
>> proprietary systems used by applications that deal with saved links. Its
>> aim is twofold: to use an open XML format to encourage standardization,
>> and, secondly, to create a single, standalone bookmark file for each user
>> that is part of their normal data and stored centrally.
>> 
>> You can find out more here:
>> 
>> http://umarks.org/
>> 
>> There is a quick introductory article here:
>> 
>> http://umarks.org/info/introduction/
>> I would welcome feedback on any aspect of UMarks.
> 
> A quick Google for XML bookmark applications turned up XBEL:
> 
> http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/
> 
> In what way is UMarks different from, and better than, this venerable
> XML application?
> 
> Richard

Received on Thursday, 2 September 2010 17:39:38 UTC