I have problems with both storing bookmarks in Safari and finding addresses in a list of some tens of websites. So I’ve taken the bookmarks out of the browser and I am thinking of breaking them down into multiple HTML documents. Basically notes in the form that a browser can understand. This way Safari won’t mess them up and I will hopefully find addresses to websites in a way that feels cognitively less demanding.
But my understanding of the Web and browsers is from the 90’s. Are there still books written to understand the pragmatic basics for creating HTML documents and to be able to build a foundation for learning more if necessary?
But what you propose, I think, is something I did for ages. I made a little “portal” (as we called them back then) of my own, stored locally as an .html file, and set that as the browser’s home page.
It’s really not hard to learn enough to do that, especially if you’re not set on it looking terribly fancy.
<h1>Name of Section</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.literatureandlatte.com/">Lit & Lat homepage</a></li>
</ul>
There, that’s enough for a heading and a bullet list of links, where each <li> is a List Item.
Are there still books written to understand the pragmatic basics for creating HTML documents and to be able to build a foundation for learning more if necessary?
Sure! Piles upon piles, but these days I’d start with the bounty of free tutorials on the web itself. I’d only buy a book if I was looking to get into the field of web design.
But I would maybe look at software that could help with this basic idea, first. Something like Logseq is very good at annotating lists of links and connecting pages of thoughts together. Even Scrivener has a decent feature set for going above and beyond what most browsers give you for bookmark management.
I did what I did with .html because I already knew it, and so it was for me a natural way to tweak my browser setup. I don’t know if I’d go into learning HTML just to organise my bookmarks into some pages though. I’d want some other reason to invest the time into it, myself—like learning to make better ePubs.
HTML is not that hard to learn, especially if you keep it simple. Associated with HTML is “Cascading Style Sheets” (CSS) which I think is complicated but is commonly used to perfect the “look” of a HTML document. Stick to HTML, as introduced by @AmberV above.
Remember always that HTML is a “mark-up” protocol to specify to a browser how to display the text. It’s not really a language, but some like to call it that.
Perhaps a good starting point on the web is HTML Tutorial . I suggest you start there. No need initially for any books, IMHO … but if you move into CSS … well, I learned from books about that and I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned!
While it would certainly be fun and educational to build your own, before you go to the trouble, there’s already good dedicated bookmark managers out there.
I use Raindrop.io. It’s accessible via web site, browser extensions, mobile apps, or desktop apps, which all sync with each other.
Wow, this gave me a wonderful blast of nostalgia. Wasn’t the Netscape Communicator like this, with all kinds of things in it? I think however that having a new application with more features is not the solution. Taking on a new program has costs with needing to learn to use it and later with changes to the interface. Even with just Safari and the other applications that come with macOS, I find myself turning features off. A nice feature would be for Safari not to do a search when typing in the URL bar, just letting me type the address that’s already in my mind.
The snippet of HTML you posted works nicely. Also, breaking the list of bookmarks into texts within a Scrivener notes project seems to help. Maybe it’s because those texts can be moved to be beside other, related things, which then help to imagine a path to that note. It seems having a list of websites was just the starting point and I need to do more thinking in order to understand what I’m trying to solve for.
A neat trick with Scrivener is that it actually has a Bookmarks feature. While of course its bookmarks can store links to other areas of the project, files on your system, and other such things, it can of course store lists of links to the web.
So a very simple idea is to make a card for a topic, open its Document Bookmarks list in the inspector, and start collecting links for it. Even just one card per link isn’t wasteful, and with the synopsis it gives you room to annotate the purpose of the list or topic. Naturally since it can link to other cards within these lists, it opens the way for cross-referencing between topics, too.
You should be able to drag and drop straight out of the browser address field into this area, or copy and paste URLs (on a Mac anyway).
You could also just use the Finder for storing link docs to webpages, and naming them and organizing them in the familiar Finder-y ways. No page coding required. You can drag a web address right from the address field of your browser and drop into a Finder location to create a weblink document.
If the basic organizational capacities of the Finder will do the trick for you, this might be a simple no-coding approach for you.
This solution feels more comfortable than dealing with HTML. I just didn’t see the “why” behind people’s recommendations of bookmark managers. I’ve put together lists of notes in Obsidian and DevonTHINK before, but didn’t see a benefit in it. So, lately I’ve been just collecting free-form thoughts in a Scrivener project and put together a trusty, flimsy calendar/todo… thing by putting cards for days in folders that represent each quarter of the year. Together they’ve allowed me to deal with problems with the Mac and applications that just make me want to erase the storage and start from scratch.
It’s odd how the way a program feels seemingly changes how you see the work and materials in it. It doesn’t feel like another damn list anymore. The “linking your thinking” sort of thing never clicked for me, but with this solution, helpful connections are forming on their own and actions can be connected directly with links to web sites. I should see a somewhat hierarchical list of texts, but there is instead a collection of index cards. Each has a one-liner to explain it, some links to websites for direct action and can magically expand to an infinite supply of paper.
Sorry. I’m feeling things instead of explaining them. I get bogged down mapping out issues without being able to choose a solution, often because the “form of it” doesn’t feel right. (Yeah.) Lists of things to do and browser bookmarks are ratholes that became unpleasant a long time ago, so relief gets to have a day.
Not to sound artsy-fartsy, but I seem to either have trouble processing lists in my mind or there’s some kind of subconscious “feeling thing” that gets in the way. I have project folders in Finder, but unless I’ve worked on the project recently, looking at a list of files just doesn’t get my memory going and the associations come like a snail over a stovetop.
With the initial idea I saw links just kind of dropped in between text, pictures and whatever else. Perhaps the seed for the idea was that annotating links in this way might allow for enough time for an address to a website to move into long-term memory. Since my preference is to type addresses, a system of these kinds of notes as bookmarks would solidify addresses in the mind through repeated visitations. And addresses that are too complex to remember, or that are rarely visited could be found by “thinking of a thing” which would bring to mind the associated note.
This is part of the reason why I still use paper for a lot of organizational things. No, it’s not digitized or searchable – and sometimes that is a problem – but I’ve known how to use it since I was six and the learning curve is non-existent.
