[XML-SIG] XBEL / Call for extension

[David Vevar]

Hello,

I contacted you not long ago about an "icon issue" regarding XBEL in 
general and Konquerer in particular.

I also contacted David Faure of KDE who implemented XBEL (well, almost 
;-)) for Konquerer bookmarks. After some exchanged messages (having in 
mind that most of todays browsers tend to be fairly colourful ;-)) we 
came to a conclusion that it would be a good thing to change (or extend) 
XBEL a bit. We propose an icon repository at the end of XBEL document in 
  form of an <icons> element, something like this

<icons>
   <icon id="..." location="..."> base64-encoded data. </icon>
   ...
</icons>

To be more specific, <icon>s could point to external locations (web 
URL's or local-machine repositories) and/or keep icon data inlined as, 
say, base64-encoded binary (Mozilla(s) already have that), containing 
images in various formats (jpegs, gifs, pngs), ico files, maybe even 
something more exotic (in that case we'd also need to put a content-type 
in there somewhere).

Bookmarks could then refer to these icons (through their ids) with some 
referrer attribute.

The point of all this is that having such a format could result in a 
compact (one XBEL file) bookmark repository.

I'd be glad to leave the details of specification to you. What I need to 
know is whether you'd even consider it, and if so, how soon can we 
expect the actual specification?

I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
David