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Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

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Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#131

Post by RiverCrochet »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #118
WorldMaker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it relates to why for many Tabs seem to be the "new" bookmarks. Browser bookmark UX stagnated at some point in the 90s, but tab UX keeps improving. Especially on mobile devices, tabs keep screenshots of at least their last state. Users often have a general sense of time from their order of tabs.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I love bookmarks. They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later. To me they're completely different purposes. Tabs are short term - for whatever you're working on right now. It's like a short-term cache, a worktable to k…

> They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important.

Bookmarks alone don't quite do it because stuff is moved or dies. A saved copy of the webpage does do it, though, along with the bookmark. SingleFile is a godsend here. I also really like Shiori and other similar bookmark managers that snapshot the webpage along with the bookmark. Even if the saved copy is incomplete or not high-fidelity, it's often enough.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#132

Post by RiverCrochet »

Needs a date field and support for tags, which can just be optional hashtags in the title.

I would suggest the date field be YYYYMMDD for sortability.

     20250828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files (github.com/soulim) #bookmarking #textfiles`

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#133

Post by uncircle »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #132

Needs a date field and support for tags, which can just be optional hashtags in the title. I would suggest the date field be YYYYMMDD for sortability. 20250828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572 Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files (github.com/soulim) #bookmarking #textfiles`

Then one wonders why this isn't a CSV file.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#134

Post by cpmsmith »

chuckadams wrote: post #125
WorldMaker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it relates to why for many Tabs seem to be the "new" bookmarks. Browser bookmark UX stagnated at some point in the 90s, but tab UX keeps improving. Especially on mobile devices, tabs keep screenshots of at least their last state. Users often have a general sense of time from their order of tabs.

I can't stand having more than a dozen or so tabs open, let alone hundreds. And I might not want them to keep state, but I could see how a "snapshot" bookmark could be very handy, so why not have "bookmark tab" automatically save the state? Or heck, let me drag a tab onto my bookmark bar. We already have the technology, but the UI around it has barely evolved in 20 years.

For what it's worth, you can drag a tab onto your bookmark bar, at least in Firefox.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#135

Post by Night_Thastus »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #131
Night_Thastus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I love bookmarks. They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later. To me they're completely different purposes. Tabs are short term - for whatever you're working on right now. It's like a short-term cache, a worktable to k…

> They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. Bookmarks alone don't quite do it because stuff is moved or dies. A saved copy of the webpage does do it, though, along with the bookmark. SingleFile is a godsend here. I also really like Shiori and other similar bookmark managers that snapshot the webpage along with the bookmark. Even if the saved cop…

For me, it's moved or dead infrequently enough that it's not a problem.

And given how dynamic and interconnected content on websites can be, I don't see a lot of use for snapshots - too much would be missing from a snapshot. Could be nice for an in-case-of-emergencies though, at least you've got something.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#136

Post by cpmsmith »

snackbroken wrote: post #75
II2II wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some people, they have no need for bookmarks. For other people, bookmarks may be useful but the implementation is not. Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found u…

> You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20... Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creat…

Firefox's implementation of "Copy link to highlight" isn't enabled on stable yet, but can be enabled manually. The ticket to enable it is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948471

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#137

Post by [deleted] »

account42 wrote: post #66

I think this is going in the wrong direction. While cool URIs don't change [0], many URLs that you'd like to bookmark are not cool. So for bookmarks to be useful long-term you need to store much more data than just the URL. At the very least you need a timestamp to be able to find the resource you wanted to bookmark on the Internet Archive in the future. But better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside th…

[deleted]

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#138

Post by b33j0r »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #118
WorldMaker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it relates to why for many Tabs seem to be the "new" bookmarks. Browser bookmark UX stagnated at some point in the 90s, but tab UX keeps improving. Especially on mobile devices, tabs keep screenshots of at least their last state. Users often have a general sense of time from their order of tabs.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I love bookmarks. They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later. To me they're completely different purposes. Tabs are short term - for whatever you're working on right now. It's like a short-term cache, a worktable to k…

I think that we are information hoarders by nature, and that it is mentally taxing to discard something potentially useful forever.

So we file it away to relieve that mental stress. We now have the option to retrieve it should it ever become necessary, but we probably won’t.

I find the same thing to be true of note-taking and storage units.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#140

Post by Lammy »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #80

The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this: 1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open 2. It already supports an embedded title. 3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal. You can also organise them as files in...folde…

FreeDesktop-dot-org also has a Desktop Entry spec with a `URL=` key and is what you get if you drag an address bar favicon to a folder on a Lunix desktop: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la...
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