[XML-SIG] XBEL / Call for extension
Uche Ogbuji
Uche.Ogbuji at fourthought.com
Fri Jan 28 07:54:40 CET 2005
On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 18:22 +0100, David Vevar wrote:
> 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?
This sounds well enough, but I think it should be a matter for
extension.
Just for starters, a Mozilla-like browser might prefer to use a data
scheme URL. Another might prefer to use entities, etc.
I think XBEL should be as simple as possible, and icons feel too much
like crossing the line.
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com
Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html
Introducing the Amara XML Toolkit - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/01/19/amara.html
Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286
UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html
Manage XML collections with XAPI - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xapi.html
Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html
Packaging XSLT lookup tables as EXSLT functions - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook2.html
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