Once upon a time circa year 1996, bookmark files were plain ASCII html files. Things were simple and straight-forward. I always liked to edit the bookmark files using my good-old vim to reorganize things.
This evening I was trying to sync my laptop bookmark with the one in my home pc. To my horror, the diff just gave me a ton of junk. Upon inspection, it seems nowadays the browser even embeds the site's icon images into the bookmark files.
This approach is hideous. What are the advantages? Save some bandwidths in retrieving the icons? The saving will be minimal because the icons are in the order of less than 1 kb.
The verdict is out: Whomever came out with this idea should be locked in a smelly toilet for 3 weeks, with no internet access, of course.
It is time to write some scripts to parse the bookmark and remove all the icon data. Duh.
3 comments:
On basis of good programming principles, every piece of information should be in TEXT format.
TEXT formats survive the longest.
Wanna save space use common compression techniques like 'tar cvjf' on TEXT formats.
You bet the even after application has reached the end of its life cycle, the information contained in TEXT format will still survive and will continue to find usage in newer applications that replace the old one.
TEXT is powerful for this reason.
Use TEXT.
(Social service message from F.Stream)
Opera and firefox still uses just html I think. But I'm too lazy to confirm for you. :)
The embedded icons are in text-encoded, which in my opinion, as useless as binary data, except they are printable.
Those bookmarks are exported from firefox, if you are kind enough, please help me to confirm the opera bookmarks. :)
Post a Comment