469175 - Enhancement: Extend tagging to url's (without bookmarking them)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Places, enhancement)

Description

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

I couldn't find a dupe, so filed this one. I think it would be awesome to expand the tagging service to be able to tag websites without bookmarking them. Kind of like giving your own personal description for any website without cluttering bookmarks.

From my own personal experience:

Bookmarks are for my constantly visit sites (bookmark toolbar), for sites with long url's (so I don't forget them), or that odd site I found somewhere which I'll probably never find again.

Tagging would provide organization in cases not mentioned above. Kind of a personal organization for the web (MyWeb). Also, sometimes I really don't want to bookmark some site, but don't have a choice if i want to remind myself of it. So kind of a lightweight storage.

This would also compliment the awesomebar, when I type a url in I get to see my tags next to the history items (not just the random title some developer decided to give the site), and can associate sites visually.

All in all, if done right, this could be really cool!

Comment 1

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Just as a note, I'm proposing something like Gmail's labeling, where folders become irrelevant and the whole central idea is about associating conversations with labels (here that would be associating web pages with tags). This provides for ultimate organization and work flow:

As it stands now a user has to 1) bookmark a page (via the star icon), 2) place it in a folder, 3) tag it for maximum exposure.

The tagging process is much simpler: 1) tag your page! That's it, it automatically is now organized under a certain tag, and gets the exposure in the awesomebar etc. I think this would be very intuitive and user-friendly.

The subject probably doesn't reflect this, but I wanted to stress that this is *not* a bookmark facility, i.e. most of this is already there, just begging for more stream-lined ui.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the actual issue that causes this not being implemented is the fact history expires, and tags would expire with history, so you're saving an information that will disappear for sure as soon as that page disappear.
What you ask would require rethinking to tags as a list of arguments that the user create, and are always available as a list to choose from, only their contente changes (bookmarks are always there, history expires).
For sure hwv that can't be done with current implementation, so when moving out tags from bookmarks, we should think deeply to this so state what we want to tag, since the database schema is different based on that, and won't allow to go back.

Comment 3

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Marco, this enhancement is not to tag history per se, even if history is disabled (or in private browsing) this would work. It's kind of a lightweight bookmarking only a totally different scheme. Think of it as instead of yahoomail's folder setup you get Gmail's labeling. The database would store all the information (independent of history) which should consist of the url and the tag. Then users can navigate through their tags and when a url is typed, this would show up in the awesome bar. This might even be more appropriate for the star icon. Additionally, you can't tag something twice with the same tag, so the star icon would really be optimized for this.

Comment 4

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Alex: what do you think of such an enhancement (for 3.2, or somewhere down the line)? I don't think this should replace bookmarking as some users will still want that, but as a lightweight, stream-lined second choice?

Comment 5

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Currently we are trying to maintain this terminology:

Information that is implicitly collected, and may be automatically deleted over time = History

Information that the user explicitly creates, and will not expire or be automatically deleted = Bookmarks

So under that definition, tagging a page is a bookmark, since you probably don't want it to be automatically deleted, and it wasn't implicitly created by the browser, it's user data that was explicitly created.

I totally agree with the overall premise of not cluttering up your bookmarks toolbar or menu, which is why were pretty adamant about creating the unfiled bookmarks folder as the default location for bookmarks to appear when you click on the star and write some tags (despite a lot of people concerned that it is hard to later find these bookmarks).

You might be interested in dietrich's work over in bug 434946 about providing a keyboard interface for quickly tagging a page.

Comment 6

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Yeah, I guess with the enhancement (and others as well) this bug would be pretty much moot, just thought of bringing up the idea of centralizing on the tagging (as opposed to bookmark, oh and then you can tag the bookmarks as well). I love Gmail's labeling idea (prefer over the old folder and file style), but that's just me... and I *could* implement almost the same thing in Firefox as well.

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