Re: Client-side searching proposal

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Tue, 31 Jan 1995 03:37:03 +0100


>Yes, this is possible. The original proposal however would also allow
>anyone to specify a cleint side search keyword, which would mean
>that I could jump to and highlight any part of your document that
>I wanted, without you providing a search engine or adding an anchor
>specifically for my needs.

You can also do this without contacting the server, or using URL's.
One problem with this is that you limit yourself to searches that are
applicable to HTML and to document fragments. Say I have a 350MB SGML
document, and I want to search for:

activists within 20 words of templar

or a database to which I send my natural language query:

List all the employess with large salaries

What should happen? We need to standardise this functionality (or at
least the mechanisms allowing it), and this whole client side
searching thing is just a subset of this bigger problem.