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Comment by account42 | Hacker News Reader

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 the bookmark instead. It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that or other relatively simple usability enhancements instead of blindly copying Chrome's UI (which usually means removing features).

[0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

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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 keep everything in your head right now easily accessible.

Bookmarks are long term, like a filing cabinet. You may not be using it today, but you want to hold onto it for later.

If I had to use either one for the other purpose, it would suck.

> I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later.

I pulled up an old bookmark file that I had backed up on CD-R and pretty much every single link was dead. So at best, it was just a memory of something that I thought was worth saving at one point and might go back to someday. So more like what you said: "history of things I've found that are interesting" but not being able to use them to get the website (unless it's in Wayback Machine perhaps).

Weird. For me it's quite rare that I run into a dead link. I think I ran into one Youtube music video recently that was taken down for Copyright, and an old niche forum that went down. That's about it. The rest are still valid.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Nifty, hadn't noticed that. I only switched back to Firefox as my daily driver a few months ago after a long time with Chrome, so I'm still finding new things.

Now we just need it to save the page state like it would for an unloaded tab. But I guess the hard parts of that aren't really implemented after all, all kinds of issues though with serializing the page state, making it work with sync across platforms, or just dealing with someone trying to open the same state multiple times...

I don't think this project is necessarily going in the wrong direction, but I agree that keeping track of web URLs requires more data than just the URL and title.

At the very least, I personally need tags. Tree hierarchies are too limiting, but tags allow adding free-form metadata which can be used to quickly find anything. I often don't remember the actual URL or title of a web site, but I'm looking for a general category, and with tags I'm usually able to find what I'm looking for. This does require a certain level of discipline from the user to use tags consistently, but they work well IME.

These days with ML tools it's easier than ever to assign relevant tags to URLs automatically, though I would personally not rely on them because of their propensity to hallucinate and not follow conventions.

And, like you say, web sites change and disappear constantly, so snapshots are important as well.

I've been meaning to try SingleFile/ArchiveBox/Wallabag for months now, but I'm currently too comfortable with Pinboard. Pinboard has been working great for me for many years, contrary to the negative buzz around it, but I don't have confidence that it will stick around forever. I just hope that I can export and migrate all my snapshot data as well...

Bookmarks for me are mostly useful as quick links to highly "dynamic" sites (like HN), where offline snapshots are less useful, or for massive sites that are not quick to snapshot, like Wikipedia (an offline snapshot of Wikipedia is definitely useful, I just don't think the browser is the right tool for that).

For long-form content that I want to come back and read later, I find Wallabag is quite good. For making snapshots of large websites I use Kiwix.

I use my "blog" as a bookmark list. Every link is its own Markdown file with frontmatter tags. Sometimes I add more context or text, based on what I'm linking to. Some time ago I added a cron job that takes all links and looks for their archive.org entries in a similar time period and puts them in a JSON file. If the original goes down, there is always a permalink available that can be rendered instead. There is also a cron job that checks for link availability. If there is no snapshot, the link gets added to a TODO stack and add I manually create an archive.is entry later.

> It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that

I'm trying out using the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, which essentially does this (and using it for anything I'd previously have bookmarked).

> better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead.

I've been using Zotero for that, but I again wish we had a browser maker that was concerned about users, and felt their only goal was to give the user as much control and ability as they can handle, and as much protection as they ask for.

Sadly, Zotero and a lot of other software in that line is built with no thought to speed, I think more than a few thousand entries will make it impossible to open, browse, or search. This seems to be a commonality of all of this type of software; that it isn't really meant to be used.

I agree, annotating bookmarks is quite valuable, including highlights, which could also be stored in text.

Logseq, etc, are tools that help facilitate this, albeit in not plain text format, but close.

Good points. I use Evernote Web Clipper to save pages for a similar reason. Having the content not just the URL also means it's easily searchable.

Being able to save a page also seems to be against the interests of publishers now - they would rather you revisit the page than have a copy. Substack for example seems to try to block the web clipper because you could clip paid articles and read them after your subscription lapses.

I use Monolith for the snapshot. It saves the whole page as a single HTML file, and it could append the timestamp to the file name.

Even better would be snapshotting the page multiple times with exponential intervals, and providing a mechanism to diff any changes.

I hate it when (news) articles change without acknowledging the changes.

Edit: come to think of it, MediaWiki + a crawler bot would be near ideal for this.

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