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

This resonated because I realized my relationship to bookmarks was different - I don't save bookmarks, I save or want to remember sentences and saving a bookmark wasn't the best way to do that.

I try to read little I am not looking to apply, or be conscious it's for pleasure/interest

If I bookmark something, I consider it unread. If I read something, I make sure I bookmark and annotate it and tag it to make my mind more actively work with what I'm reading (and make it easer to find.)

The result? 10-15 years of every link I've ever saved, organized and annotated by me. Chronological, sorted, I can see what I was paying attention to chronologically, or by topic, and at any time search any of my highlights and notes.

This is the nice part because it isn't an AI tool, but maybe something that can feed into an AI tool quite nice. My curation, where relevant, as input.

Best of all, it just works. It's not heavy or tedious, anything that has my attention, gets my attention.

The one thing a text only approach will not solve is that URIs while universally defined will not perpetually stay online.

Diigo, and other tools like it allow you to save your own cache, or perhaps submit to a public cache that page so once it invariably goes offline, it doesn't.

There's lots of tools out there to help with this each person's way, I liked diigo.com, but lately think tools like logseq with a few basic plugins are offering a lot of promise to directly save a bookmark, whatever snippets are relevant, and they are always and instantly searchable.

Not really the same, but I find bookmark folders to be pretty useful. I have a "daily", "weekly", "taxes", etc., and it's just one click to open them all up in one go. They could easily be converted into a cron job with a plaintext URL list like TFA.

> 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 creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.

> As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services.

Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).

Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

Could you go over how you save bookmarks with Emacs, I'm curious as a fellow Emacs user.

Reading through the comments in this thread, it looks like the population is split in two groups. The first group considers "bookmarks" as a directory of often-visited sites, and needs a way to avoid typing their URLs every time. The second group intends "bookmarks" as a wish list for sites that might need a second (deeper) visit.

It may be time to find another metaphor for this second group: "postcards" might work better than "bookmarks".