180611 - Save new bookmarks without "welcome to" starting page title

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Felix Miata]

Poorly enlightened webmasters often begin the page title with "Welcome to". This
useless prependage needn't be saved, thus making bookmarks more usable and
compact. Certainly the user can edit each such bookmark, but I doublt more than
the tiniest handful think to do this, and a majority would welcome an automatic
strippage anyway. Eventually, bookmark sorting should be working, and few will
be looking for anything except W's in the W's.

For a worst case example of the value of these useless words, see attachment
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=106586&action=view to bug 129399.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

in that case use Bookmarks/File bookmark and correct it yourself.
This would not work for international users ("wilkommen" in german..)
and we don't need another pref.

-> wontfix.

Comment 2

[Felix Miata]

Welcome to, regardless of page language, is useless noise in bookmarks. There's
no reason to add a pref. Just do it. No reason it can't work in many languages,
including German. Bookmarks are currently awful, and anything to improve them is
welcome.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

assign to reporter, please file a patch if you want that being fixed.

Comment 4

[Chris Lyon]

>There's no reason to add a pref. Just do it.

So you're suggesting violating the bookmark spec and adding a feature that is
counter-intuitive, as well as being a localization nightmare, just because you
find it inconvenient to edit your bookmarks?

If you have no plans to include your own patch, please resolve this bug as WONTFIX.

Comment 5

[Felix Miata]

Where is the bookmark spec? If disposing of irrelevant portions of a page title
to save screen and disk space would violate the spec, then the spec should be
changed. It is not counter intuitive for bookmarks to make sense. There is no
need for 5% of all new bookmarks to start with the same two usesless words and
get shoved into the W's when bookmarks are sorted. In case you missed the
screenshot I provided, all those links in the mouse pointer column were
collected from the web in just a few minutes, and I estimate that no less than
5% of English home pages so start.

This bug is not about me editing my bookmarks. I know perfectly well  how to do
that (best done with Netscape). The issue is about improving every Mozilla
user's experience by automating easily forgotten or overlooked useful tasks.
Unlike in IE, where on creating a new favorite the user is presented an edit
window for changing  the properties of the new favorite, Mozilla simply pastes
the new bookmark on the end of the file, where it is easily fogotten until such
time as the user tries to find it and doesn't, because he doesn't see expected
words beginning the bookmark name.

This really isn't all that much different from filtering to the trash inbound
mail containing the words "MAKE MONEY FAST".

Comment 6

[Chris Lyon]

From the Mozilla bookmark test case:
(http://www.mozilla.org/quality/browser/front-end/testcases/bookmarks/add-bookmark.html)

"Expected Results: The title of the page you selected should appear as a
bookmark..."

If you want to change the name of the bookmark as you bookmark it (like IE), use
File Bookmark (Ctrl+Shift+D)

Comment 7

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

This is really an Evangelism bug. The problem is that webmasters start their
<title>s with "Welcome To." Although it might be nice for Mozilla to compensate
for that somehow, I don't see how it would be worth an engineer's time in the
long view. What should happen instead is that every time you find a page with a
"Welcome to" in the title, feel free to send the webmaster a couple of links
that describe good <title> creation.

-<

Comment 8

[wacheo]

I think instead of adding the "Welcome to" remover in mozilla, people interested
in it should start a project implementing it as a plugin, if it's possible.

Comment 9

[Felix Miata]

Attachment: 1024x768 screenshot

In an ideal world, evangelism would be the right solution. As a practical
matter, evangelism of an issue like this will take quite some time to bear a
crop of fruit suitable for a real reduction in hunger. In the mean time,
providing the requested enhancement would be at nominal cost with real benefit.
The bookmarks will be both smaller and more useful automatically. For those who
want to evangelize, by all means do so. Maybe the screenshot attached can be
the picture that speaks many words for those who wish to travel the evangelism
route, by attaching a link to the screenshot with minimal words of introduction
to each offending webmaster.

Comment 10

[Daniel Wang]

-> WONTFIX again

1. It's not possible to determine what to remove and what not to,
   by the Web monster or the software. What's good and what's not
   completely depends on the user's preferences and situations.

2. It's hard to define what's a clutter. Is "the" a clutter? And
   "news," "new!," "Dec. 12, 2002," or "search results"?
   Should we always convert "Los Angeles" to "LA"? How about (r)
   and (tm)?

   Say we have a title with a series of phrases connected by "-"
   such as "News clawer - alt.sex - Downloadable porn" or
   "MGR Competition 2002 - Decorative Food - Welcome", abviously
   the phrases all serve important functions, so what do we remove?

3. Internationalization nightmare. Let me just give you a simple
   example, I can put Japanese word for "welcome" in a Big5
   Chinese Traditional character encoding, and worse I can
   "forget" to declare the proper encoding so now you have go guess

If you want to edit the bookmark title, use
Bookmarks | File Bookmarks

Comment 11

[Felix Miata]

"File bookmark" is the problem. It has little or no meaning to the average IE
convert, who will choose "Bookmark this page", which presents no opportunity to
do a sanity check on the new bookmark.

There's no reason to remove other words. That isn't the request. The two English
words "welcome to" beginning the page title is all that is requested here.
There's no need to involve international issues.

This request would be functionally moot if bug 158543 is fixed and, though not
technically dependent, should be left open as long as that bug is unresolved, or
until I can fix this myself.

Comment 12

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

If you don't understand what "File Bookmarks" means, either try it, or use "Bookmark this page" followed by "Manage Bookmarks".

This bug is not fixable because
- not all users use the same language
- not all webwriters use the same language
- not all users browse only pages in their own language
- the part with low content can be at start or end and is not always worded the same way.
- the only really reliable way to have the bookmark title be as one likes it is to edit it oneself.

Resolving INVALID. KaiRo, sorry to spam you again, but I expect someone will REOPEN this bug a third time with no more reason than previously for doing so.