For some people, they have no need for bookmarks. For other people, bookmarks may be useful but the implementation is not.

Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found useful. You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. If the book is lost, you end up having a reference to something that you cannot obtain. And if you just add books to the end of your list, you still end up having to search through the list. The only way around that is to spend time organizing your list. It's no wonder why bookmarks are useless to so many people.

The author doesn't really solve the problem with bookmarks, except for one. The last one. By sticking a bookmarks file in a project directory, at least you're only searching through a list of bookmarks relevant to the project. If you are no longer interested in the project and delete it, you're also getting rid of bookmarks that you (hopefully) no longer need. It also addresses the portability of bookmarks. As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services. Look at moving bookmarks from one Firefox installation to another: you either use online sync, export to HTML to import from HTML, or import the database (which replaces your current bookmarks with the ones being imported).

> You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book.

There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20...

Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.

> As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services.

Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).

Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

I see your point. Also, maybe to add to it, I should have been rather judicious in collecting bookmarks.

And — possibly to also literally keep them inside the browser’s default bookmarks/favourites whatever browser one uses. Not on some fancy service with AI and what not.