Re: Expansion of anchoring and marking: highliting

This thought has been growing in the back of my mind for ages (since I
started browsing the web years ago), and just graced itself upon my
conciousness recently.

Why not expand upon the anchor (A) and URL syntax to allow highlighting
of certain phrases after activating a hyperlink.  For instance, you can
currently jump the page to a location in the document with:

       urlportion#gohere

Using the same utilities (ala <a name="gohere">...</a>) expand the URL
syntax to specify that you wish to highlight every occurance of name=gohere
rather than actually moving the top of the page to it's first occurance.

For discussion's sake only (because I don't know what characters are/are not
valid in a URL) let us assume that the character '!' would be used to
designate a highlite request from a jump-to request.  I could then create a
search mechanism which would search a document for a certain phrase, and at
every occurance of said phrase it would encapsulate it with:

    <a name="phrase_searchphrase">searchphrase</a>

Where the actual name tag is the same for each phrase, and the given URL
accessing this document would be:

    http://x.x.x/somewhere/document.html!phrase_searchphrase

Then, upon display each occurance of phrase would be uniquely highlighted
for easy finding...

I hope this is appropriate for this mailing list, it has taken me a while to
find a seemingly suitable one...

-Brandon Gillespie, Utah State University WebMaster-

Received on Friday, 14 July 1995 15:08:18 UTC