1. Folder vs Tag (FakeTag User Guide)

In this chapter, I will try to explain what I meant by describing FakeTag as a Chrome extension that "turns your bookmark folders into tags" at the beginning of this guide and how it works.

The difference between folders and tags

Let's discuss this fundamental question first: what is the difference between folders and tags in the context of a web browser? Both are used to organize bookmarks but they have an important conceptual difference as explained below.

Folder concept

The following screenshot shows an example of using folders, which is Chrome's default method of organizing bookmarks. The diagram that follows represents the relationship between the folder and the bookmark that appear in the screenshot. Conceptually, folders are objects that contain bookmarks as shown in the diagram. Therefore, if we see folder names as keywords to categorize bookmarks, each bookmark has one and only one keyword associated with it (in other words, a bookmark can't belong to multiple folders at the same time).

┗ [F1: "News"]
   ┗ [B1: "BBC"]

Tag concept

Now, let's look at an example of using tags. Conceptually, tags are objects attached to bookmarks as shown in the diagram. Therefore, if we see tag names as keywords to categorize bookmarks, each bookmark can have more than one keyword associated with it.

[B1: "BBC"] ~ [T1: "News"][T2: "UK"]

That's the conceptual difference between folders and tags. The purpose of FakeTag is to allow you to organize your bookmarks in the latter way.

Using folders as tags

Unlike other bookmark-tagging extensions out there, especially cloud-based ones, that have their own databases for tags, FakeTag implements the bookmark-tagging functionality by putting multiple bookmarks that point to the same URL into different folders and treating those bookmarks as a single entity (a composite bookmark) as shown below. In other words, "tags" that FakeTag offers are actually ordinary folders made to look like tags (or "fake" tags, if you will).

┣ [F1: "News"]
┃  ┗ [B1: "BBC"] (=> https://www.bbc.com/)
┗ [F2: "UK"]
   ┗ [B2: "BBC"] (=> https://www.bbc.com/)

FakeTag treats the folder/bookmark relationships above as:

[B1/B2: "BBC"] ~ [T1: "News"][T2: "UK"]

Before going into details on how to use FakeTag, let me give you some pros and cons of this approach.

Pros:

• You don't need to create tags from scratch after installing FakeTag.
• Your tags are synchronized by Chrome itself (not by an unfamiliar third-party server).
• You don't lose your data after uninstalling FakeTag.

Cons:

• Your bookmark collection becomes "cluttered" with a lot of duplicate bookmarks.
• For technical reasons, sometimes you still need to think in terms of folders and bookmarks as you'll see in later chapters.

Prev Top Next