Womcat Bookmarks 2.7 review
DownloadWomcat Bookmarks is a project that maintains Web bookmarks in a set of hierarchical folders
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Womcat Bookmarks is a project that maintains Web bookmarks in a set of hierarchical folders.
It can output the bookmarks as an HTML page and as an RSS 2.0 file that can be placed on a Web site.
The RSS file maps folder names into the "category" element. It can download other RSS files, treating them as categorized bookmarks to create a local database of Web bookmarks that can be browsed by subject.
It supports RSS discovery by allowing posting RSS file URLs as new items.
It also acts as a basic RSS feed reader. It also includes a Weak Subscriptions feature, which is a bit like a personalized version of BlogDex.
Here are some key features of "Womcat Bookmarks":
Womcat Bookmarks are intended to point to other Womcat Bookmarks. Womcat allows for 2 types of RSS items: recommendations and referrals. A recommendation is an RSS item that points to an ordinary web page. A referral is an RSS item that points to another RSS file (which may or may not be generated by Womcat Bookmarks). An XML extension element http://www.womcat.org/:type is used to distinguish between these two possibilities.
Womcat Bookmarks is subject-oriented. RSS puts subjects in the element separated by forward slashes. Womcat Bookmarks requires that every recommendation be contained in a subject. Subjects can also be contained in each other. So if subject Algebra is contained in subject Mathematics, then the category will be Mathematics/Algebra.
Although Womcat Bookmarks subjects for one user form a hierarchy, it cannot be expected that different users will have equivalent or even consistent hierarchies. The most that can be hoped for is that different users might use the same titles for individual subjects. Thus Programming Languages/C is not a very good hierarchy, because "C" by itself is potentially ambiguous. Better is Programming Languages/C Programming Language. In effect subjects are globally considered to live in a flat namespace, and their titles should be unambiguous in a global context without any dependence on position in a user's hierarchy. The end result is to facilitate merging of Womcat Bookmarks (i.e. RSS data) from different users such that they can be usefully browsed by subject.
Womcat Bookmarks are considered to be an accumulating collection of bookmarks, not a transient collection of news items, with items only being deleted if they cease to be relevant (or cease to exist). This is problematic when Womcat is used to read RSS files that may or may not be accumulative or transient in intent. I propose to add an extension element to deal with this, along the lines of specifying a period that the file covers, and optionally another link to a different RSS file that covers that period, e.g. "1 month" for a file that only contains links added up to a month ago, "forever" for a file that contains all current bookmarks. This will also be useful as a way for RSS readers not to have to re-read an accumulated bookmarks file that has grown very large.
What's New in This Release:
Various improvements to user interface: ability to stop downloads, pre-delete multiple mentions, add more links between objects in pages. Also update versions of libraries used by the application.
Womcat Bookmarks 2.7 keywords