Standardizing Bookmarks in the Atmosphere - Wesley's notes

Wesley of semble has "been thinking about standardization and sharing lexicons" for a while, as "saving and organizing links" is a pretty common activity. He's inspired by standard.site's approach: "they define a content property on the site.standard.document, leaving the actual shape of the documents content up to the app that implements it" and suggests a minimal bookmark lexicon so we can "leave additional details up to specific apps?... they can agree on shared lexicons for properties of records, but only if desired. "

He goes very minimalistic: a basic bookmark is a URL. Properties provide everything else. If an app needs data in these properties (eg title), it can fetch them directly and store it in its db (how Semble handles Margin bookmarks); display the bookmark as an external link (how Leaflet "shows standard site document with content not defined by pub.leaflet.content"); or ignore it.

The UX challenge lies in the fact that multiple apps (semble, sill, margin) allow you to author bookmarks: "Now they have three different bookmark content types to manage." While it's not difficult for all apps to display all bookmarks, it's another matter entirely when users want to edit all their bookmarks, created using different apps, from any of those apps. One canonical bookmark lexicon without custom properties would solve this, but would sacrifice flexibility, and therefore innovation.