[XML-SIG] Metadata in XBEL

[Uche Ogbuji]

> One often requested feature, is for merging. For instance, in a company,
> there could be a "company-global" set of bookmarks, to be merged with
> the user's bookmarks - much like everything else in KDE already has
> a global and a local directory, possibly with even more levels (e.g. for
> groups of people).

Yes.  I actually implemented an off-line merge earlier, but I think a 
standardized merge indicator would be useful.

> To make that possible, XBEL could have a sort of "include this other
> bookmark collection" tag, and it could be up to the application to create
> aliases towards those global bookmarks in the user's bookmark file.
> Well, that's just one solution - it allows to change the order, to remove
> a global bookmark, to insert its own anywhere... but it doesn't notice new
> bookmarks in the global collection, unless some timestamp is used.
> 
> Another way could be that including another set of bookmarks simply means
> that all those bookmarks appear first, then those in the user's file.
> This way, changes to the global collection are automatically taken into account,
> but it's impossible to modify/remove/reorder/change anything in the global
> collection. It's probably much easier to implement too, and has the exact semantic
> of a #include. I suggest to add this to XBEL then: a simple 
> <include href="file:/path/to/bookmarks/collection.xml">.
> There's still the issue of relative paths vs absolute paths, but, well... 
> no solution here either :}

That should instead be spelled

<merge include:href="file:/path/to/bookmarks/collection.xml"/>

Or such, so that processors that don't have first-class merge support can 
still include the other file through xinclude.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
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