Re: what would be the best way to let users define http ids for bookmarks and topics?

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:50:28PM -0500, Marja Koivunen wrote:
> Now that the bookmarks basically work (I do need to work more on ui and 
> see why xpcom components are not always installed and list of other 
> things), some early thoughts about letting users define they want to use 
> http ids instead or uuids.
> 
> The original plan was to also allow users to define a http:// prefix for 
> their bookmark and topic ids when do wishes if they have a domain or let 
> the bookmark server to do that automatically.
> 
> I could simply just ask for an http:// path and generate id's underneath 
> it. For instance:
> 
> user given path:
> http://example.org/ubimarks/myids/
> 
> bookmark id:
> http://example.org/ubimarks/myids/8643f740-8d77-11d9-9b9c-f6eaee43b958 
> (with #? or /? or nothing?)
> 
> or if the uuid component is not available something like:
> http://example.org/myids/time/2005-02-10-24-00-11-10
> 
> This would not create an http file with the bookmark or topic just the 
> id so it does not really matter here if the id is http or not. I did 
> hear discussion stating that the intention should be that the http id 
> files always exists.
> 
> If I just ask for a prefix, nothing prevents the users to use someone 
> else's domain for the ids, which is not perfect.
> 
> On the other hand http kind of requires a document to exists and 
> existing http URI does let the user put some info to that. But what info?
> 
> Practically it is better to not include info about the bookmarks or 
> topics in the id file. It is better to use the bookmark file where all 
> other info already is so that we don't have to check all id files in 
> addition to bookmark files.
> 
> Maybe instead of a file for each URI the user could define a current 
> prefix rdf file and just list all the ids in it? In that case, we need 
> to be careful to not use relative URIs etc. that were discussed earlier 
> in this draft document http://www.w3.org/2003/12/20-local-global.html. 
> Also if it becomes a requirement to add ids to the file when they are 
> created it would again prevent the user creating topics or bookmarks 
> when not online.

Interesting ideas, and too much for my little head to comprehend until
I'm sober, so I'll just document a fairly simple, plebian approach:


This notion involves using attributions and user names. The idea is
that each user has an area in the filesystem in wich they can create
whatever hierarchical file system they want. If the user was running
multiple clients, they would need to do further coordination between
the clients. For instance, the user tells amaya to use
  http://iggy.w3.org/annotations/users/marja/amaya/
and bookzilla
  http://iggy.w3.org/annotations/users/marja/bookzilla/
Users could use the names for both the document names and the
annotation/bookmark(/earl assertion) names.

Just a late night thought.

> Ideas to solve this?
> 
> Marja (wondering how a simple improvement became so complicated :-))

hah! welcome to the details.
-- 
-eric

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