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by iamcalledrob 290 days ago
The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this:

1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open

2. It already supports an embedded title.

3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal.

You can also organise them as files in...folders.
2 comments
Lammy 290 days ago
FreeDesktop-dot-org also has a Desktop Entry spec with a `URL=` key and is what you get if you drag an address bar favicon to a folder on a Lunix desktop: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la...
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eadmund 290 days ago
> It's basically just INI/TOML

That’s a dealbreaker for me. I like something that I can use grep and other Unix utilities on. There’s a reason that the tabular style formats of /etc/passwd, crontab and inetd exist.

> You can also organise them as files in...folders.

+1 on this concept, though. For some reason folks forget that the filesystem is a pretty decent hierarchical database!

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iamcalledrob 290 days ago
It's really just Key=Value, with [InternetShortcut] as the first line.

Should be pretty easy to grep through. It's an absolutely minimal format

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z3ratul163071 290 days ago
I have tool creating html files like this:

<html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://www.someurl.com' " /></head><body></body></html>

upon opening these htmls , the browser just redirects to the actual url.

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