Hello, I've tried to post this proposal some months ago, but maybe the middle of August wasn't the proper period to get some attention. :) The work I did was oriented in finding a better organization for a collection of many cathegorized items. Cathegorized items, before you skip this message, can very well be Debian/Gnome/KDE menus, packages shown in dselect or browser bookmarks. The work I did is collected in a short paper I wrote: http://people.debian.org/~enrico/tagbk-draft.pdf and in an experimental application to manage Galeon bookmarks and other bookmarks saved in the XBEL format: http://people.debian.org/~enrico/tagbk.html The bookmark problem was chosen because I had far more bookmars in the browser than packages in the system, and so I had the occasion to work with bigger numbers. However, the problem remains the same in case of application menus or package cathegories. Short presentation of what is in the paper: There is a problem with hierarchies: Freshmeat and others have realized that just one cathegory per item is not sufficient, and people who collect browser bookmarks organized as a statical hierarchy are likely to have a hard time finding them as their number grows. Because of this, I advocate the use of multiple cathegories per item (or multiple sections per package). Then I recognize that hierarchies are the established practice to present the collection to the user. To respect the established practice, I've designed an algorithm to automatically build a cathegory tree from it, while respecting well defined properties on the resulting tree. These properties guarantee that the user can always have some clue about what branches to follow to reach a given item, resulting in better organized menus. In this way, the user can easily find out what he needs. I hope this can be a useful contribution to the debian desktop project, and I'm here to help should this proposal fit some part of the distribution or desktop efforts. Bye, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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