Synchronizing bookmarks - Request for comments

On 17. Dec 2020, at 0:41, colecmac at protonmail.com wrote:

> I agree that people being able to manage their own bookmarks easily in
> a text editor is attractive. However I think I'd rather stick with a more
> strict format rather than one that's endlessly extensible like this one.

I think the primary advantage of this bookmarks .gmi format would be 
interchange between clients (and instances of the same client) without 
humans editing the file. I don't think a client would want to store their 
bookmarks in this format, as there may be additional (possible internal) 
metadata to deal with, too.

When it comes to manual editing, I could see reordering and tagging your 
existing bookmarks as real-world use cases, and a simple line-based format 
makes these quite straightforward. But in any case, I'd probably prefer 
doing this via the client GUI myself.

> Maybe one browser will use text lines as comments, and another will use
> them as descriptions, and Amfora will ignore all text lines, but then one
> day someone will want Amfora to support descriptions, but it can't tell
> what's what, etc.

A simple companion spec for client bookmark exchange similar to the Gemini 
subscriptions one should solve this problem adequately by defining what is 
meaningful and what should be ignored. Another format like XBEL could 
still be used if one's client supports additional information per bookmark.

> XML and the XBEL spec prevents these issues at the expense of user writing.
> I'm not sure how many users really are going to be writing their own
> bookmarks though, and of those, how many are going to have trouble with XML.

XBEL is certainly an existing solution to exchanging bookmarks, and but it 
would be nice to have something that is compatible with the Gemini ethos. 
Personally I would even prefer JSON-based formats to XML (easier to 
parser, easier for humans to read), but gemtext has the unique advantage 
of being viewable by all clients even if they have no concept of importing 
bookmarks, or bookmarks in general.

--jaakko

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