Most of the web pages visited by a user are generally revisits. For revisits a person has four options:
1. Use of back/forward buttons. (if it is in the same session.)
2. Use of the recency list, known as History.
3. Use of the bookmark user saved for that page.
4. Access the page again afresh.
Generally, users have to visually scan the whole history (maintained as a recency list) to locate the item of interest. It might be difficult for the user to recognize the page representation (page title or URL) as it might not match with how the person remembers the page. Bookmarking a page is something people have to do explicitly. Therefore, it requires a separate decision from the user to bookmark a page or not. Also maintaining a cluttered list of bookmarks becomes a separate concern.
If all the visited pages are kept in a single storage by integrating the history and bookmarks, the user can directly search and access those pages from that storage. And if the person remembers in hindsight that the page should have been bookmarked, he can do it later from the history. This will also eliminate the need for maintaining the highly cluttered list of bookmarks (which might contain stale and useless links).Moreover, if a good unified user interface is available, it eases and speeds up the search for the then required page.
So, the integration of bookmarks and history will not only enable the user to dynamically perform a search for the revisit, but integrating this integration (bookmarks + history) with Xesam can also be facilitated. Then, Xesam can be used to perform a wide search on the person's system from the central object pool of bookmarks + history alongwith other places on the GNOME desktop.This would also increase the usability of the desktop search and metadata services depending upon the user's interests.
Use Cases:
1. Vivek wants to find and revisit a page that he visited 15 days back.
2. Mark wants to bookmark a Wikipedia page he visited earlier. He looks in the integrated storage, finds it and bookmarks it for future reference.
3. Alice just closed a web page and then realised she could have bookmarked it as she would need it in future. She goes to the integrated storage,searches for it using the date filter and bookmarks it.
4. Rishi wants to find out a page about Opyum he bookmarked earlier under the topic "Fedora".
5. Bob wants to recommend a page titled "love calculator", which he visited last week to his friend. Although he has forgotten the URL, he remembers that he had visited it on February 14. He searches the storage using the date filter to find the page.
6. Varun wants to find out a page, of which he remembers he typed something on.If the history/bookmark items are sorted by relevance, he can find his page among the pages under the category 'typed'.
The aim of the project is to complete the last year's work done and not let it go waste.
The project includes:
- Implementation of an integrated sqlite3 storage for bookmarks and history.
- Implemention of an intuitive user interface for viewing, searching and managing objects within the integrated storage.
If time permits, Integrations with Xesam for accessing and querying the object store from Epiphany extensions and other GNOME components can be facilitated.
More info on: http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/BookmarksHistoryIntegration