Web Clipper: Properties

Properties are typed fields added to the top of a clipped document as frontmatter.

Types

Type	Use for
Text	Author, publisher, URL
List	Tags, authors, ingredients
Number	Rating, price, word count
Checkbox	Read / unread, archived
Date	Published date
Date and time	Clipped-at timestamp

Pre-populating from the page

Properties can be pre-populated from page variables, so they fill themselves — see 06 Variables and Filters. An author property backed by the author variable is simply correct on every clip, without you typing anything.

Combine with filters to normalize as you go — a date parsed into a consistent format, a list split from a comma-separated string.

Managing properties

• Manage all properties in one place, and remove unused ones.
• Import and export property definitions.

The import/export matters if you use the clipper on more than one machine, since extension configuration lives locally in each browser.

What frontmatter means in MDflow

Here is the honest picture, and it is worth being clear rather than overselling:

MDflow has no concept of properties. Frontmatter is just text at the top of your markdown body. MDflow does not parse it, index it as fields, filter by it, or offer a properties UI.

So what is it good for?

• Full-text search finds it. Searching for a tag or an author name matches the frontmatter text, because MDflow searches the whole body — see 04 Search.
• AI agents read it. A model fetching the document gets the metadata in context — source URL, author, date — which is exactly what it needs to cite the document correctly or judge its relevance.
• Other tools use it properly. Export your workspace (see 02 Exporting a Workspace) and open it in Obsidian, and that frontmatter becomes real, queryable properties. This is standard YAML frontmatter, not an MDflow invention.
• You read it. Six months later, "where did this come from?" is answered at the top of the document.

What to include

A useful default for clips:

---
title: The page title
source: https://example.com/article
author: Someone
published: 2026-07-16
clipped: 2026-07-16T13:00
tags: [research, markdown]
---

The source URL is the one to never omit. A clipped article without its origin is much less useful — you cannot check it, cite it, or return to it. Everything else is optional; the URL is not.