Background to Open Bookmarks

[stml]

Can everyone on the list who's taking part make sure they've had a
look at the following:

http://wiki.openbookmarks.org/
http://blog.openbookmarks.org/
http://booktwo.org/notebook/selfish-vs-social/
http://booktwo.org/notebook/openbookmarks/

There's a lot of background to this discussion, particularly as to
what is in and out of scope, which has already been covered. Feel free
to use this thread for in and out of scope discussions.

The important things, to me, are universality and practicality. We're
defining something *useful* (so it's not going to satisfy every
possible thing it could do) and *usable* (so we may use well-known
techniques even if more obscure ones have benefits). And we're going
to be totally platform-neutral: that's the biggest part.

We're setting out to solve a small problem, not every problem.

James

[stml]

Further to Dave Pawson's question in the previous thread (http://
groups.google.com/group/openbookmarks/browse_thread/thread/
f3b487ffda7def51/a60228b6eee30bd4):

It's worth clarifying at this point the development and authority of
the Open Bookmarks project.

I founded Open Bookmarks as a personal project, after much discussion
with many people, some of whom are on this list. I created the wiki
and the blog and so on, which I will continue to run.

There is a stated intention and aims, as well as use cases on the
wiki, for the project.

I'm very grateful for everyone's help and discussions, but this is a
discussion, not a final draft. The request has always been for people
to help, through discussion, if they have something to share. It's not
an "open development" in the sense that I think Dave intends, although
of course I'd like to get as close as possible to that without
descending into endless debate over what Open Bookmarks is - exactly
the problem the whole project is intended to avoid.

I hope that's understood.

On Jan 7, 11:21 am, stml <jamesbri...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Can everyone on the list who's taking part make sure they've had a
> look at the following:
>

> http://wiki.openbookmarks.org/http://blog.openbookmarks.org/http://booktwo.org/notebook/selfish-vs-social/http://booktwo.org/notebook/openbookmarks/

[Dave Pawson]

On 7 January 2011 11:29, stml <james...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I founded Open Bookmarks as a personal project, after much discussion
> with many people, some of whom are on this list. I created the wiki
> and the blog and so on, which I will continue to run.

Thanks James.
Very clear. It's yours, your editorship.

regards

--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
Docbook FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

[Hadrien Gardeur]

It's worth clarifying at this point the development and authority of
the Open Bookmarks project.

I founded Open Bookmarks as a personal project, after much discussion
with many people, some of whom are on this list. I created the wiki
and the blog and so on, which I will continue to run.

There is a stated intention and aims, as well as use cases on the
wiki, for the project.

I'm very grateful for everyone's help and discussions, but this is a
discussion, not a final draft. The request has always been for people
to help, through discussion, if they have something to share. It's not
an "open development" in the sense that I think Dave intends, although
of course I'd like to get as close as possible to that without
descending into endless debate over what Open Bookmarks is - exactly
the problem the whole project is intended to avoid.

I hope that's understood.

I have mixed feelings about that. I could take another example: OPDS pretty much started as a way to browse catalogs between Stanza and content providers like Feedbooks. The whole thing was entirely designed by Marc at Lexcycle and content providers like me.

The lead moved to the Internet Archive in 2009 and the project was completely opened in its development.

Although we had some intense discussions, it never turned into the kind of endless debate that you're mentioning and quickly, we managed to move forward and release a spec. It is now widely adopted by some of the most popular applications for reading (see the list of clients using the Feedbooks catalog for example at http://www.feedbooks.com/help/ecosystem).

If we don't have the ability to vote for anything, at the end of the day, I'm not sure that this is worth it spec-wise, as this is something that I would also like to implement and have some influence over.

[stml]

Hi Hadrien -

I completely understand your concern, and I do want to open the
project up as much as possible. However, at this stage, I do not know
(and do not have enough experience to know, I freely admit) how to do
that. I'm aware some on the list may have more experience, and I'd ask
you to bear with me.

At this stage of the project, I believe discussion is best. That's why
I keep asking questions, and clarifying certain things. I don't want
to get into in-depth discussions of XML versus JSON vs whatever, for
example, yet: we just want to be able to say: it could be this, it
could be that. We're trying to answer a pretty limited set of
questions, after all: http://wiki.openbookmarks.org/First_challenges -
let's stick to these.

We're not at the voting stage yet, but I do believe in doing enough
editorialising to keep the aims and scope of the project on track.
This will inevitably lead to some conflict, I'm sure, but I also hope
we can keep it to a minimum. I think the problem and what we're trying
to achieve has already been quite clearly defined, and my scope
responses so far have been entirely in line with what's been stated up
front.

James

On Jan 7, 11:43 am, Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gard...@feedbooks.com>
wrote:

> Feedbooks catalog for example athttp://www.feedbooks.com/help/ecosystem).

[Hadrien Gardeur]

James,

It would be a shame that with the kind of people currently on board, this project simply turns out to be a way to let other people chat in your playground while you take the final decisions alone.

Keith for example has experience dealing with such projects: he did a great job on the OPDS spec and is currently leading some of the most important IDPF/EPUB related efforts such as EPUB Linking that I've mentioned a few times.

In projects that are developed openly, conflicts and lack of scope/focus are quite often early on, but they naturally disappear as discussions advance and some people naturally lead the development.

I can assure you for example that my goal is to be as pragmatic as possible about this project, and get something out of the door as fast as possible while keeping the whole thing open to debate.

You mention that you're trying to answer a "limited set" of questions, but I feel like the current version, is actually not limited enough to easily move forward. Dealing with identifiers and positions are two very complex questions for which we won't find any "easy" answer and I feel like we should piggyback as much as possible on existing works to move faster. 

It's also very difficult to design something such as positions completely on our own. I'll give you a quick example: if we rely strictly on text strings to identify a position in a book, for most EPUB reading system it'll be very hard to use such bookmarks. "War and Peace" is several megabytes long, and without a path to the right file, and not just a book identifier + text fragments, it'll take a lot of resources on mobile devices to sync such bookmarks.

Hadrien