Re: Client-side searching proposal

Dave Hollander (dmh@hpsgml.fc.hp.com)
Wed, 25 Jan 1995 22:47:44 +0100

> There are a couple of related capabilities that might be taken into account
> when designing the syntax. When dealing with large documents, retrieving
> only a portion around the highlighted words. In Acrobat docs, Adobe is
> providing the means to retrieve one page at a time, for example. Thus, you
> could request the first page on which a highlight occurs.
>
> In structured text, especially HTML, I suspect that nabbing a cohesive part
> of the document while preserving the structure is a bit trickier, but
> certainly worthwhile.
>

This brings up a discussion on multiple "piece-of-a-document" type
containers. A "sub-body" tag could be defined to be a complete transport
entity that does not inherit behavior from its siblings. Indeed,
style sheets and partial reveal strategies of most newer browsers
this might make this ability real handy.

It also would make those of us who maintain a "file per URL" happy. Multiple
documents could be maintained in one file and yet delivered in multiple
"virtual pages".

This type of "virtual page"/sub-body approach has been implemented in
the SDL dtd and seems to work out quite well.

Regards,
Dave Hollander