- From: William Cheng <william@cs.ucla.edu>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jul 95 22:36:59 PDT
- To: www-html@www10.w3.org
- Cc: william@cs.ucla.edu
In message <199507131610.MAA07220@beach.w3.org>, Daniel W. Connolly writes: >In message <9507130640.AA15757@lanai.cs.ucla.edu>, William Cheng writes: >>There's been a discussion on html-wg on keyword tags (for building >>indices or keyword-to-URL references). Does anybody know what the >>final word is? > >Hmmm... I don't think there's a final word yet, but you can >look at the archives: > >http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/archives.html > >Hmmm... I can't find any threads on this subject specifically >(but I'm having some technical difficulty.) > >In short: see if the META element will do the trick for your >application: > >http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC30 >Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 - Document Structure >Fri Jun 16 19:56:22 1995 What I would like to see is that anything that can be a destination anchor can have KEYWORDS associated with it. A META element can be used to associate keywords with the whole (or the top of a) document. How about something like: (in doc1.html) <P ID="potmac" KEYWRODS="Boston Harbor, Potomac, River" TITLE="Potomac River"> (in doc2.html) <A ID="missi-river" KEYWRODS="Mississippi, River" TITLE="Mississippi River"> What I would like to do with these keywords is to put a collection of pages together (let's call it a book) and build an index for this book and store the index in, say, http://myhost/mybooks/book1/book1.bookindex. Book1.bookindex looks something like: 1 doc1.html#potmac Potomac River 2 doc2.html#missi-river Mississippi River Boston Harbor, 1 Mississippi, 2 Potomac, 1 River, 1 2 The first half maps an anchor to a title (also gives a numeric ID to be used later). The second half associates every keyword with a list of anchors (since a keyword can not have commas, a comma is used to indicate the end of the keyword). One can then build a browser that does ``user-friendly'' search on book1 using a interface that looks like the Search command in Windows Help which looks something like: +=================================================================+ | Book index for http://myhost/mybooks/book1/ | +=================================================================+ | Riv.. <-- User types here | +---------------------------------------------------------------+-+ | |^| | Boston Harbor | | | Mississippi | | | Potomac | | | > River <-- Highlighted elem moves as user types | | | |v| +---------------------------------------------------------------+-+ | |^| | Mississippi River <-- List changes as highlight above moves | | | Potomac River | | | |v| +---------------------------------------------------------------+-+ The middle pane is a scrollable list so the user doesn't really have to come close to spelling the desired keyword! This approach is not attempting to solve the big search problem but to facilitate searches when only a relatively small number of pages are involved (like a book or a manual, imagine if you can do something like this to search for the word CLASS without getting too many hits). The bookindex files, when compressed, may be small enough to ship around easily so you can have a html page linking book titles to bookindex URLs. Also, the bookindex can be generated quite easily. The browser is not hard to write either. -- Bill Cheng // UCLA Computer Science Department // (310) 645-8328 4667 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024 // USA william@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!{uunet|ucbvax}!cs.ucla.edu!william WWW Home Page: <URL:http://bourbon.cs.ucla.edu:8001/william/>
Received on Friday, 14 July 1995 01:37:11 UTC