Bookmarks with empty titles get ignored during import

saburoichimo

Some of the entries in my import html don't have a title, particularly the ones where it's obvious what it is from the url alone, making a title redundant:

```
<DT><A HREF="https://en.wikibooks.org/" ADD_DATE="1635822300" LAST_MODIFIED="1649206505" TAGS="reading"></A>
```

I've noticed these entries get skipped during import.
Is there a way to circumvent this, short of entering the title for all of them?

dstillman

The Zotero translation architecture interprets the absence of a title as an error, so bookmarks without titles are skipped. You can modify Bookmarks.js in the 'translators' folder of your Zotero data directory and have it set the title to "Untitled" or something. You'll need to restart Zotero after making changes.

saburoichimo

That's good to know, thanks.
A bunch of "Untitled"s sounds worse than a bunch of redundant titles, so I'll just fill in the empty ones in my bookmarks before importing.

Now that I've installed the extension it doesn't even seem to allow changing the title from whatever the page defaults to, let alone having an empty one.
Is this something that is planned for future releases (referring to changing the title in the extension during creation)?

dstillman

Now that I've installed the extension it doesn't even seem to allow changing the title from whatever the page defaults to, let alone having an empty one.

The Zotero Connector will always try to find the highest-quality metadata available for the page you're saving. Any further edits you would make to the item in your Zotero library after saving. The last-saved item will be selected in Zotero automatically.

saburoichimo

But having to go to the library every time is quite cumbersome.
Editing the title during creation process is quite useful, just like editing the tags which you can do currently.

dstillman

It sounds like you may be thinking of Zotero as a direct replacement for a browser bookmarks manager, where the title is mostly what matters and you can edit it directly from the save popup. Zotero is a much more advanced research tool — there's really not much that's special about the title compared to other fields, so there's no reason to expect you'd be able to edit the title specifically. Trying to duplicate the entire item editing interface — with autocomplete, creator type modes, etc. — would add a huge amount of both technical and UI complexity. You can also save multiple items at once from a page, so it doesn't even really a lot of sense to try make items editable in the save popup.

Adding a button to bring Zotero to the front might make sense, though switching between your browser and Zotero shouldn't really take more than a split second if you're using keyboard shortcuts effectively.

saburoichimo

>It sounds like you may be thinking of Zotero as a direct replacement for a browser bookmarks manager

Partly I am.
I wanted to use it as a single place for my online bookmarks as well as research paper backlog (especially because the two often overlap) and a connection between them and Obsidian / Dendron.
I have seen Zotero recommended for both those things, so I thought it could let me kill two birds with one stone.

>there's really not much that's special about the title compared to other fields

The title is the first and most central thing that gets shown, both in the extension and the library and is the main thing, along with tags that's used for retrieval.
The latter (tags) can be edited.
I think the title should be editable too, especially considering it's already shown.

dstillman

Tags can be added in the save popup because they're user-created and don't exist otherwise. Zotero has fairly unparalleled metadata extraction abilities, so metadata will often be exactly correct and not need to be edited, and when it's not, most Zotero users will need to edit the full item. Zotero is a general research tool that can be used in lots of ways, but it's also a citation manager, and the majority of people using it are generally concerned with correct metadata, which means reviewing the entire item — creator, publisher, date, etc. — for correctness in order to generate correct citations. It just wouldn't make sense for Zotero's primary use case to privilege editing of the title.

Not really much more to say on this. I understand you're coming from a bookmarks manager where the title, tags, and folders are the only pieces of metadata, but that's just not the case in Zotero. If we tried to address this, it would be in the service of making it easier/quicker to edit the full metadata, whether that be trying to offer the item editing interface in the save popup or providing a button to bring Zotero to the front.

saburoichimo

>The Zotero translation architecture interprets the absence of a title as an error

I've just tested it, and it looks like I can remove the title in Zotero without issues.
If I can manually re-add the title, import the bookmark, then remove the title, why can't I just add the bookmark without a title to begin with?

adamsmith

why can't I just add the bookmark without a title to begin with?

The rationale for the error is that the absence of a title virtually always means the translator isn't working as it should -- as you yourself note above, titles are central to item metadata. This can be changed in the translator (by writing something like "Untitled" in the title field for cases with missing title) so if you have some basic javascript skills, you could pretty easily customize that for your purposes, but I think we'd be disinclined to do this in general.

saburoichimo

I don't understand this selective reasoning.
It seems like when it's convenient for you, the title is central.
When it isn't, it isn't.

If it's central, then let the user edit it on add.
If it isn't, then let the user not have it on import.

As it is currently, it's basically the worst of both worlds.

>The rationale for the error is that the absence of a title virtually always means the translator isn't working as it should

No that's just not true.
It can just as easily mean that there was no title.

Using whether the title is there or not as the indicator of whether a translator is working or not sounds like a case of bad development practices as there are much better ways to debug and test for errors than seeing whether an optional field is present.

>"Untitled" in the title field for cases with missing title

As noted above, that defeats the purpose of leaving out the title in the first place.

DWL-SDCA

Please understand that you are asking for Zotero to serve a purpose other than the one that led hundreds of thousands of users to select it. What you are requesting will likely inconvenience me and other users of Zotero who want to take advantage of its extraordinarily robust citation and PDF capture and file import capabilities and its citation style formatting.

Bookmark management software exists. You can read about it by searching for "browser bookmark manager" with your favorite search engine. I use a Mac and I use a bookmark manager in addition to Zotero.

dstillman

@saburoichimo: I think you'll generally find that coming into an open-source project and accusing the developers of "bad development practices" and asking that the entire design of the software be changed for your particular use case isn't going to be a productive approach.

This isn't complicated:

1) Successful translation almost always produces titles, which is why it's used as a signal that something went wrong so that the import can error out rather than filling people's libraries with bad data. In the case of site translation, this lets Zotero fall back to a different translator, which is a core part of the Zotero saving process.

2) The majority of Zotero users need to check all fields for metadata correctness, so prioritizing editing of the title in the space-limited save popup doesn't make sense.

These things are not in conflict in any way.

It might make sense for the Bookmarks import translator specifically to have a way to accept entries without titles, but there's not currently any mechanism for a translator to do that other than setting the title to "Untitled", since this isn't relevant for essentially anything else in the Zotero ecosystem. The Bookmarks translator is extremely low priority in the context of Zotero usage, despite your repeated failure to accept that. If that's a problem for you, go use some other software and stop wasting our time.

saburoichimo

>What you are requesting will likely inconvenience me and other users of Zotero who want to take advantage of its extraordinarily robust citation and PDF capture and file import capabilities and its citation style formatting

I don't see how.
It shouldn't have any effect on anyone who doesn't use it.

saburoichimo

Accusing developers of bad development practices is not a productive approach in any sort of project, open or closed source, and isn't something I was doing.

If a practice is actually bad and is pointed out as such, that's no longer an accusation.

Does it really need to be explained why relying on something that happens "Almost always" is a bad practice, especially in something precise like software where things can be tested for without relying on chance?

>The majority of Zotero users need to check all fields for metadata correctness, so prioritizing editing of the title in the space-limited save popup doesn't make sense.

Not sure what you're saying.
Are you saying that that is what the majority of the users do every time they add an entry?
If so, those are an unreasonably meticulous bunch and I would like to know how you gathered the sort of data that would let you arrive at that conclusion.

>The Bookmarks translator is extremely low priority in the context of Zotero usage, despite your repeated failure to accept that. If that's a problem for you, go use some other software and stop wasting our time.

Umm.. there's no need for toxicity.
Don't lash on the users just because you're having a bad day or something.

dstillman

sounds like a case of bad development practices

Accusing developers of bad development practices […] isn't something I was doing. If a practice is actually bad and is pointed out as such, that's no longer an accusation.

All right, closing this thread. Multiple people have spent time trying to explain the reasons for various parts of Zotero's design, and you seem more committed to being obnoxious than engaging in a productive discussion.