Re: [john@math.nwu.edu: Re: Client-side highlighting; tag proposal]

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Sat, 11 Mar 1995 08:45:28 +0500


>I'm glad to see this discussion. With respect to marking-up HTML on
>the server side, we here have indexes of documents which reside
>elsewhere. The search engine can provide a keyword hit list, and in
>some cases, the (purported) character positions for these words, but

So there is a possibility for you server to be inaccurate in both hit
occurence and position?

>In any case, I'd like to see a solution which does not require the
>search engine have access to the actual document at search time, and
>does not require the search engine or indexer to parse HTML. Oh, and
>throw in the moon, while you're at it!

Quite! Perhaps what we really need a low-bandwidth, graphical
rendering standard. Then we can simply render the document as we see
fit, and we get greater protection for content into the bargain
(people would have to reassemble a document from the rendering stream
to be able to steal it) ;-)

Seriously though, there are problems to be solved, and I cannot see a
truly universal solution being possible without major surgery.