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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (19505)	5/4/2001 10:31:34 PM
From: PMS Witch	Respond to of 110653

IE Favourites and Netscape’s Bookmarks… These two popular browsers store URLs for re-visitation differently. IE creates a separate file for each URL and stores them in C:\Windows\Favorites using Windows 9? long file name ability to record the name or description of the site with a filename extension of .URL. This file contains plain text. Along with some other bits of information, the file contains the URL where the site is located. Along with the .URL files, this folder contains a hidden file, DESKTOP.INI that tells Windows how to display the files in IE. When you click Favourites and select Organise, IE stores your preferences in DESKTOP.INI. The advantage of IE’s method is that corruption in one file is isolated to only one URL, leaving all others functioning normally. This method also makes copying favourites from one machine to another a bit more challenging, because the information resides across many data files, with organisation information in a hidden, non-text file. Netscape stores bookmarks in an HTML file. When you use bookmarks, Netscape displays this HTML file as it would any other. Altering bookmarks requires writing a new file. Damaging this file may cause many links to be lost. This is a minor shortcoming. The convenience of being able to copy bookmarks from one machine to another is a strong advantage provided by using this method. Programs to convert from one system to another can be very simple. Beginning with IE Favourites, it’s a simple matter of copying filenames from a directory, appending the URL from within that file, and augmenting this information with some basic HTML code to display it. Likewise, a Bookmark file can be parsed and files written to the Favourites folder containing URLs. Neither operation presents serious difficulties. Programs that are more ambitious will attempt to incorporate Favourites organisation. This information is stored in DESKTOP.INI in the Favourites folder. The Bookmark file should display selections very similar to the way they would appear in IE. Preserving Bookmark organisation when moving from Netscape to IE appears more challenging. Additional options, convenient user interaction, and genuinely useful help or hint sub-systems can enhance the functionality of these conversion programs. Since they all do a very simple task, there isn’t much opportunity to make them very different from one another. Also, doing such simple work, these programs should be reliable, small, easily installed, and not create any major disruptions of the existing system on which they’re installed. One would hope they don’t bring a ton of baggage. Cheers, PW.