Re: [whatwg] New feature: better integration with browser find interface

David Young <dyoung@pobox.com> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 11:57:46PM -0700, Mitar wrote:
>> Hi!
>> 
>> Followup to this proposal. So after more than half year browsers still
>> have issues searching in dynamic apps. Google Docs can still only
>> intercept ctrl-f, but for people who uses menu search then does not
>> work.
>
> It's funny you should mention this, because just last night I was
> cursing Wikipedia as I tried to search within a page on my iPhone.
> Wikipedia's default, outline view for mobile makes in-page search
> ineffective.
>
> One way to fix this is for "infinite scrolls" and other pages that load
> content "on demand" to provide methods for the client to ask the server
> to search/send the on-demand content.

Infinite scroll is the halting problem outsourced to Layer Eight. As the
user, you never know how much content will come, until it actually ends.
This problem can not be solved – except for not using infinite scroll.

>> On the other hand, sometimes it is useful to not allow search to be
>> intercepted. For example, I tend to use browser search for menu in
>> Google Docs to search over comments sidebar, while I use ctrl-f to
>> search the document content. But this cannot really be expected to be
>> clear to users or intuitive. A better integration of such apps with
>> browsers is necessary.
>
> I'm not sure I'm picturing the right scenario.  It sounds like you want
> sometimes to limit your search to the comments sidebar, and sometimes
> to search the document.  The search override in Docs is incomplete (it
> overrides the keychord, not the search method), and a happy side-effect
> is that initiating a search by different modes (menu, ctrl-f) searches
> different page content.  Is that right?
>
> If the web platform provided "search within selection," that would be a
> consistent and learnable way for users to limit their searches.

The “web platform” does not do that, browsers do that. The browser I use
(conkeror) can already limit commands to specific elements or DOM nodes.

For example, prefixing a “c” (copy) command with “* i” limits it to
images, prefixing it with “* *” limits it to DOM nodes. The sidebar
could be an <aside> element or something similar as I understand.

I think mixing of text and meta-text often creates problems.


Greetings,
-- 
Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann
<http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>

Received on Friday, 7 August 2015 18:27:34 UTC