310888 - Managing bookmarks with categories/tags instead of folders

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, enhancement)

Description

[Yuan Qi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

Instead of making the user sort bookmarks into folders, we could adopt
Epiphany's approach and use categories instead. Multiple categories can be
assigned to the same bookmark and the bookmarks will be organized in
single-level hierachy. This is more effective than folders because folders tend
to encourage users to build deep folder trees, which means it will tkae several
clicks for the user to access a particular Bookmark. With this approach,
Bookmarks are guaranteed to be within two click's reach.

The URL included provides a brief description of the feature, but the best way
to learn about the feature is try Epiphany out yourself (v.1.4 avaialbe in Fink
and Darwin Ports).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Yuan Qi]

In order to make everythiing easy, we should add auto-completion to the category
field to make it easy for the user to enter keywords.

To go even further, we can consider analyzing the page's title and headers and
automatically assign categories to Bookmarks. This is described in
http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/08/01/intelligent-bookmarking-draft/

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This sounds like bug 287406.

Comment 3

[Yuan Qi]

It's a little bit different than smart folders in that smart folders are usually
created by the user and can have multiple rules that are not necessarily based
on the category field. New category "folders" will be created when the user
enters a whole new category to a bookmark and it cannot be modified by the user
in anyway.

Also, I don't this that bug has anything to do with any of the idea I have
suggested in the second part.

Comment 4

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

so here's two things to mention, i dunno if they help or not...

- gmail, which organizes based on keywords, gets lots of bad press because it
doesn't work like other email apps that let you organize in folders. yes, it's
tryign to change the paradigm, but if you're too far ahead of the curve, people
think you're from outer space and throw stones at you

- how many people use keywords in iPhoto? probably about as many people as are
cc'd on this bug.

Comment 5

[Yuan Qi]

I belive both examples have design problems.

With gmail, the UI for assigning labels is very primitive. The user has to click
twice to assign each label. The didn't provide a more tactile way to assign
labels (eg. by dragging emails to a list of labels). 

As for iPhoto, they didn't implement an autocompletion feature for keywords and
the keyword feature is just too obscure. Also, iPhoto already oraganizes picture
by date and "rolls", so there isn't a lot of need for user-defined tags.

ps. After doing a few good search on gmail label feature, I found more positive
press on the feature than bad presses. Most of the complaints are only
semi-valid for emails and makes no sense for bookmarks (remember, a typical user
hass less than 100 bookmarks while many user received more than 5 emails a day).

Comment 6

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

I'll confirm this as a RFE, targeted for FUTURE to keep this discussion open. I've also added "tags" to the summary to help with any onslaught of dupes we may get. ;)

Comment 7

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Interestingly, within days of each other, the Galeon-Epiphany merger is supposed to be bringing hierarchical bookmarks to Epiphany, and dria put up the wiki page about getting rid of bookmarks for tags.  I think the world is still divided, perhaps fundamentally.

Comment 8

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

I was thinking about this the other day...

I think we should keep folders as we know them and just add a "tags" option to the bookmark info panel. Then, integrated with "Smart Folders" (bug 287406), the user could use tags as folders if desired.

Comment 9

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

s/tags/keywords/ in the UI/info panel so that we're less jargon-y and stay in sync with language in apps like iPhoto.

We'll consider this bug again when we start planning for 2.0.

Comment 10

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

This bug has been buried in the graveyard and has not been updated in over 5 years. It is probably safe to assume that it will never be fixed, so resolving as WONTFIX.

[Mass-change filter: graveyard-wontfix-2014-09-24]