[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



More information about the XML-SIG mailing list