Re: Client-side searching proposal

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Thu, 26 Jan 1995 19:52:27 +0100


If anyone is interested, one of the nice features of EBT's DynaWeb
(the SGML server which does HTML conversion) is the searching. It does
many of the things mentioned, including highlighting (via the <b>
tag), and sub-document addressing.

One design decision I made for DynaWeb was to use (or possibly abuse)
the forms data (ie. the name/value pairs following the ?). This is
where the search expressions and whatnot are stored.

Take a peek at http://www.ebt.com/ and try a few searches like:

foo and (bar or baz)
foo within 5 words of bar

On the client side, searching would be quite nice, as would scrolling
to hits. It should be trivial to implement.

I should not that regexp searches are probably a good thing, but only
as part of a fuller search language that allows searching for specific
tags, within specific tags, on attribute values etc.

Is there a well defined language anywhere for searching anywhere? I
saw one called GCL, but I forget the details...