Given a huge pile of dead-tree books (the only even remotely usable form of book so far), what do you do to be able to find interesting ones? Do you put bookmarks in the books and throw them back in the pile? No, you don't, unless there's something very much wrong with you. You put the books on bookshelves, and create various indices to be able to find the books on the bookshelves according to different search criteria.

People who write browsers still seem to think that the Web is just a book. So useless are the bookmarking systems that all the usual and perhaps every single one of the browsers provide. The bookmarks are only useful for accessing a few frequently-visited sites. Yet, tab- or auto-completion in the location bar or query works even better towards that end.

Something much better than these bookmarking systems, is needed to collect piles of interesting pages from the Web; a bookshelf of sorts. Even any half-decent search engine works better than the current bookmarking mechanisms towards that end. Not well enough, however; it is much easier to find things in a small pile than a big pile. Sometimes pages even disappear from the big pile. The internet bookshelf should store the page locally in addition to remembering its address, so that at least an old version can always be found, and it is possible to do full-text search in the bookshelf. The hierarchical organisation provided by browsers for their bookmarks is also way too restrictive, not to even speak of their unusable rodent-oriented GUIs. The internet bookshelf should let one put pages under multiple categories or tags – by typing their names with completion, no less. Bookmark menus and such are not needed – are not wanted – except for perhaps a small set of very specifically chosen bookmarks. The interface for accessing the bookshelf should instead be a collection of web pages for browsing them by tags and dates and so on, and another search engine -like page for searching by various criteria, including words from the full texts of the pages.

The social bookmarking sites may provide something a bit closer to a bookshelf (but lacking a copy of the page) than browser bookmarks, but these are my bookmarks and nobody else's that I'm talking about, and I don't want to rely on some site to store my stuff. It must all work locally, with excellent browser-integration.