phil ringnalda

Truth is, I already knew, since I was watching a bug Mark attached a patch to some time before the meeting record went up, I just wanted to do a cuckoo post to get it out of my system :)

Know what Places is? I’ve been dogfooding it what seems like forever, but is really probably only since some time in November, and I barely know an outline. Spam cleaning just took me to my RSS dream post, and Places is still a lot like that vision of Atom. What it is today might be what it is tomorrow, or next Friday (in theory, α1), or it might swerve somewhere else.

But right now, it’s several things:

1. Absolutely, coming along nicely, it’s a rewrite of the bookmark and history backends, from an HTML file parsed into an in-memory RDF store and a (shudder) Mork db read into chicken entrails, to an SQLite db. I suspect there’s a lot that I don’t understand still to do, but it works, and is.
2. Start up Safari, and click whatever they call that open book icon on the toolbar, that displays your bookmarks and history (and a bunch of other cruft) in a page. Picture a calendar in the lower left, and move the search up out of that horrible position at the bottom, and replace the left pane with a Gecko tree widget, and you’ve got today’s Places view and replacement for the Bookmarks Manager. I mostly think of it as a handy way to remind me that history exists, and I should look there instead of blindly groping around in my bookmarks.
3. Then things get fuzzy and fluxy. Today, adding a bookmark is a button by the addressbar, click once to do an old-style ”File Bookmark” where it just gets thrown into the root bucket, click it again to edit metadata and put it somewhere else. By next week? Don’t ask me: I read every Places bug, plus a mailing list, and I don’t know where the UI’s going at all.
4. Tagging. It wouldn’t be 2006 if tagging wasn’t involved. Provisionally and conditionally, bookmarks are keyed by the URL, so you only have one bookmark for example.com/foo, no matter how many places it shows up in your bookmarks tree, thanks to conflating tags and folders. I don’t have a great feeling about that working out, but we’ll see. Personally, I can’t picture any way that it would work out that I delete my bookmark to example/foo in the Bar folder, only to find it still around later when I look in the Baz folder, or equally bad, delete it from the Bar folder because I’m not using it for Bar, and have it disappear from Baz too, where I still needed it. Despite being a week and change from α1, all that’s still at the point of people arguing about whether Real People have five bookmarks with no folders, or three folders and seven bookmarks on the toolbar that are critically important to them.