Ideas for Journal: How epiphany browser manages bookmarks just with tags

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <hoboprimate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ideas for Journal: How epiphany browser manages bookmarks just with
> tags (and does it nicely, with potential of improving of course).
>
> I made a screenshot slide-show of how tagging and the dynamic
> bookmarks menu based solely on tags work in Gnome's Epiphany browser.
> I hope this can be usefull to gather ideas for how the tagging system
> in the Journal could work. This could also be helpful if tagging in
> the future can be done within activities, so that they are easily, and
> thus more often, used.
>
> I show how in Epiphany:
>
> tags are searched;
> tags are suggested;
> pre-existing and new tags are added;
> tags are presented;
> and how tagged bookmarks are organized in a menu.
>
> The size is a bit big because of all the screenshots, it's 46.7 MB .
> C_scott uploaded it for me, at
> http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/eduardo-epiphany-tags.pdf
>
> Eduardo

Eben, Eduardo, and I have been chatting about this some over IRC.
What I find most interesting here is how *filesystem paths* (well, URL
paths in this particular case) are integrated with tags.

For example, when you type 'fsf', both 'http://fsf.org/' and other
things tagged with 'fsf' show up.  This ties in with one of my
frustrations with google's tag system: I have olpc, olpc-fedora,
olpc-sugar, olpc-sugarlabs, etc tags in google, when what I really
want is 'olpc/fedora', 'olpc/sugar', etc.  Sometimes I want to see all
olpc-related mail, sometimes only sugar-related olpc mail, etc.

If you accept that tags can sometimes be ordered, so that a/b is
different than b/a (although both will show up on searches for 'a' and
'b'), then this starts looking more and more like a way to view
filesystems as well, for those old enough to want to do that.

If you have files in ~/Journal/Music/Bach/Disc1 and
~/Journal/Music/Beethoven/Disc1, you can search for 'Bach', 'Music
Bach' as well as 'Bach/Disc1' or 'Music/Bach/Disc1' if you want to be
specific.  When you insert a USB key with files in a directory called
'Music/Mozart', they appear in the journal as if they were tagged
'Music/Mozart' and you can search for 'Mozart' or 'Music' to find
them.  When I copy them to my XO, the tags come with, and I have
operations to retag groups of files that are the result of a search
(which can look very much like "groups of files which are in a
specific directory").

Rather than having two separate views for 'hierarchy' and 'journal',
this unifies them so achieve a more consistent and "growable"
interface: you don't have to discard everything you know and learn a
new metaphor and interface when you start to use 'folders'.

>From irc:

(02:18:45 PM) C. Scott Ananian: by default searches will be confined
to ~/Journal; the real question is how to search *outside* that
directory.
(02:18:51 PM) HoboPrimate: look at nautilus
(02:19:04 PM) HoboPrimate: you see the directories as buttons.
(02:19:19 PM) HoboPrimate: imagine seeing just a Journal button there
(02:19:24 PM) HoboPrimate: below, the search box
(02:19:33 PM) HoboPrimate: this would mean, you are searching within
the journal only
(02:19:49 PM) HoboPrimate: now, if you click on the journal button, it
expands to allow changing it
[...]
(02:21:59 PM) C. Scott Ananian: HoboPrimate: well, in my ideal world
you could apply a tag to any file
(02:22:05 PM) C. Scott Ananian: HoboPrimate: it will just be a special xattr
(02:22:27 PM) HoboPrimate: that would rock.
(02:22:45 PM) HoboPrimate: so tagging wouldn't be a Journal specific thing, but
(02:23:04 PM) HoboPrimate: be propagated when you move the file to
other non-sugar but xattr aware systems
(02:23:14 PM) C. Scott Ananian: yes

The dynamic tag suggestion and ordering stuff that epiphany has
(nicely presented by eduardo) would be directly applicable; all we
need is the special idea that *all files are tagged by default by
their path* and *there are special ordered tags* to extend the journal
into a filesystem browser.  Browsing a directly hierarchy feels just
like browsing through tag sets; once I pick the 'Music/' tag, the
'Music/Bach' and 'Music/Beethoven' tags show up as possible extensions
to my search.
 --scott

-- 
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