[XML-SIG] XBEL features

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Mark Nottingham writes:
 > While we're on the subject of XBEL, I really like it; however, it would be
 > great if it supported the 'description' field in Netscape.

  This is a software issue, not an XBEL issue.  (This is the advantage 
of keeping the DTD and software separate! ;)  I had my first look at
the XBEL code packaged in the XML package the other day (when Uche
reported a bug to the list), and was surprised.
  You might want to take a look at the final version of Grail; there's 
a tool called "bkmktool.py" which can be used to perform conversions
between XBEL and Netscape HTML.  It works to preserve as much
information as possible; I don't recall having any problems with the
textual descriptions (which I also use, when I remember ;).
  Grail is at: <URL:http://grail.python.org/>.

 > The upshot is that you can have a cron job on your machine that regularly
 > reads your bookmarks and parses them into Web pages, while not showing those
 > that you set the description field to 'no'. Very handy.

  If your bookmarks are only maintained in XBEL, you could use the
metadata structures to create an application-specific metadata field;
using the description field for this means you can't use it for
descriptions.  ;-)
  I'm glad you like XBEL!


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives