Background Information.  Installed web browsers such as Safari, Camino, Firefox, etc. store your/their bookmarks on your hard disk.  The browers find these bookmarks by looking for file(s) with particular name(s) in a particular location and in a particular file format.  If you remove or replace these file(s) with different file(s) containing different bookmarks or reordered bookmarks, you will see the different/reordered bookmarks in your web browser the next time it reads them.  This is how Bookdog works, by reading and replacing the relevant bookmarks files.

Access in Bookdog.  To access these bookmarks as your browser does, click menu > File > My Macintosh Account and choose the name of the desired browser or service.  Bookdog opens the bookmarks file for the browser (or browser/profile) name you click and loads them into a Main Window.  The menu will include an item for each supported browser application package installed on your Mac.  The Firefox beta applications (Minefield, BonEcho and DeerPark) are recognized as sufficing for Firefox.

Troubleshooting.  For a troubleshooting report on what browsers Bookdog finds, click menu > Help > Find Browsers in Great Detail.  To show the file path and other information about the bookmarks file in the frontmost Main Window, click menu > File > File Information.

Backing up a bookmarks file.  You may duplicate any of your bookmarks files by opening in Bookdog and then clicking menu > File > Save As... to make a backup.  If you do a periodic backup of your home folder, then you already have a backup of all of your bookmarks files, except for possibly Firefox and Navigator which can store your bookmarks anywhere, but if you told Firefox to store bookmarks outside your home folder you would know that.

Background Information.  Bookdog can also create, save and open "standalone" bookmarks files of all browsers. These may be, for example, backup bookmarks files, bookmarks on another computer on your network, or bookmarks you are sharing with another person.

Access.  You access standalone bookmarks as any other document on your Macintosh, using Bookdog's File menu commands New Empty Bookmarks Document, Save and Open.  Because browsers' different file formats, which also affect the behavior of the bookmarks in Bookdog, you must choose the file format in the submenu when you create a New Empty Bookmarks Document.nbsp; You cannot "change" the file format; to save bookmarks in a different file format, create another New Empty Bookmarks Document with the desired file format, then move, copy or migrate bookmarks as desired into it.nbsp; These files are normally named "Bookmarks.plist", "bookmarks.plist", "bookmarks.html", "Bookmarks", "Bookmarks.html", "Favorites.html" or "Public.html".  As far as Bookdog is concerned, it is OK if you give them other names (except for OmniWeb, see below); as long as their .extension and kind are the same as is used by the browser, Bookdog can open the file and figure out what browser they came from.

• Standalone Opera Bookmarks.  Since Opera bookmarks have no extension, if there is a period (dot) in the filename, the "extension" will be misinterpreted. Therefore, Bookdog also recognizes files with extension .operabm as Opera bookmarks. You may use this extension when naming Opera bookmarks files to be opened by Bookdog.
• Standalone OmniWeb Bookmarks.  OmniWeb has up to three bookmarks files, which are distinguished by their names: Favorites.html, Bookmarks.html and Published.html.  When saving standalone OmniWeb bookmarks, instead of giving a file name, you give the name of the folder that will be created to hold these three files.  When opening standalone OmniWeb bookmarks, you may choose either this folder containing these file(s), or one of the three files themselves.  Bookdog will find and open all 1-3 files; however many exist in the same folder, and the combined OmniWeb bookmarks will be shown in a single Main Window.
• Standalone Shiira Bookmarks.  Bookdog does not support "Save As" Shiira bookmarks to a separate file, creating Empty Shiira Bookmarks Documents, or opening standalone Shiira bookmarks files. This is because Shiira bookmarks are an sqlite database. I believe that such a thing would be tricky to program and probably not very useful anyhow.  Request this feature and I'll reconsider.

Safari keeps a close eye on its bookmarks file, and soon after it is changed (such as by Bookdog or Bookwatchdog), Safari reads in the modified file.  The Bookmarks Toolbar is redrawn, the subfolders in the Bookmarks Menu are closed, and when you open them again, they are revised to show whatever changes or sorting was done by Bookdog.  Usually this is done within seconds, but if you don't see it in Safari's "Show All Bookmarks" view, momentarily activate another Safari window and then return to "Show All Bookmarks".  That usually wakes it up.

Bookdog avoids conflicts with other programs, Safari in particular, which you may be using to modify your bookmarks file, by logging the modification time when it read in your bookmarksand then checking to see that the bookmarks have not been modified by another program before it writes (saves) the bookmarks back out to your hard disk.  If such a conflict is found, you are warned and asked what to do.  Safari has a similar safety feature, so it works in both directions and you should never by surprised by what happened to your bookmarks.

Camino, Firefox, Netscape, Opera and OmniWeb are not cooperative like Safari.  They do not watch for changes made by Bookdog, but only read in their bookmarks when they launch.  When they quit, they always rewrite their bookmarks files without ever checking to see if they are overwriting changes made by another application such as Bookdog.

For this reason, Bookdog warns you if one of these browsers are running when it reads in their respective bookmarks, and will not allow you to save these browsers' bookmarks while they are running.

Shiira is half-cooperative.  It will read changes written by Bookdog immediately, but unfortunately does not always write changes made within Shiira until Shiira quits. Therefore, Bookdog treats Shiira the same as Camino, Firefox, etc.

Opera has options built in to sort bookmarks by name, address, description, etc.  By default, it sorts all folders by name.  Therefore, if you have set certain folders to be unsorted in Bookdog, or set some of the other advanced sorting options in Bookdog, you will not see Bookdog's sorting in Opera unless we change this option in Opera.  The option we want is "Sort by my order" (which will be the order you have set in Bookdog).  This option is available to you in Opera's toolbar, as shown in the picture below.  However, you don't have to do this, because Bookdog cleverly sneaks in and does this behind Opera's back every time you save your Opera bookmarks in Bookdog:

Safari.  Safari stores your bookmarks in this file:

     ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

The tilde (~) is the unix abbreviation for your home folder.  In more plain English, the above means: In the Finder, open your "home" folder (the house), then open the Library folder, then open the Safari folder, and find the file Bookmarks.plist.

Camino.  Camino stores your bookmarks in this file:

     ~/Library/Application Support/Camino/bookmarks.plist

More...

Opera.  Opera stores your bookmarks in this file:

     ~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences/Bookmarks

OmniWeb.  OmniWeb stores bookmarks information in three files in:

     ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5

However, if in OmniWeb > Preferences > Bookmarks, you have enabled "Synchronize bookmarks with Other Macs" (.Mac iDisk or WebDAV server), then your bookmarks will be cached in a subfolder named ServerBookmarks.  Whenever you Open or Revert OmniWeb bookmarks, Bookdog examines each of the files and loads whichever are newer, the ServerBookmarks cache or the regular bookmarks.  You can see which are loaded from Bookdog's menu > FIle > File Information.

Shiira.  Shiira 2.x stores your bookmarks in this file:

     ~/Library/Application Support/Shiira/Shiira.sql

(Note: Shiira 1.x stored your bookmarks in ~/Library/Shiira/)

This section states the general file format used by each web browser.  It does not describe all the details.

Safari.  Your Bookmarks.plist file is an Apple "property list" file.  Versions of Safari prior to 1.3, with Mac OS 10.3.8, write this file in xml format.  Versions of Safari starting with 1.3 and Mac OS 10.3.9 write them in binary format.  The binary format reads and writes from the disk much faster; typically 70% or more, and it is typically 70% smaller.  Bookdog can read either format and, when saving, will re-write the file in the same format that it found on your disk.

Camino.  As of version 1.0b1, Camino still uses the xml property list format which was used by earlier versions of Safari.

Firefox 1.5-x and Navigator.  These Netscape browsers use a text/html file format.  Unlike Safari's and Camino's, this file also includes the actual graphics of your favicons.

Opera.  Opera uses their own proprietary text file format.nbsp; It is quite simple and readable.

OmniWeb.  OmniWeb uses a text/html file format similar to Firefox, but it splits your bookmarks into three files.nbsp; The "Favorites" in your toolbar are stored in Favorites.html, your "Personal Bookmarks" are stored in Bookmarks.html, and finally your "Shared" bookmarks are stored in Public.html.  Also, none of these files contain your keywords or visit history.  The keywords are embedded into your OmniWeb preferences file (~/Library/Preferences/com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5.plist) and your visit count and last visited date are in History.plist.  Bookdog reads and writes all of this information from these various files as required.

Shiira.  Shiira 1.x stored its bookmarks in a plist file very similar to Camino.  Bookdog does not support Shiira 1.x.  Shiira 2.x stores its bookmarks in an sqlite database which is accessed using Apple's CoreData technology.  Although the object graph is publicly available in Shiira's open source code, you can't read or edit the data unless you've got some serious geek tools.