Suggestion for a search anchor

A humble suggestion that I couldn't find suggested elsewhere.  I propose a specialized anchor that would be used to locate a word or phrase within a document.  First, the form:

http://host.com/document.html#search=word%20%or%20words

would locate the first occurence of "word or words" in document.html.

http://host.com/document.html#search[3]=word%20or%20words

would locate the third occurence of "word or words" in document.html.

I realize #search would cause conflicts with some existing anchors, and #search[n] isn't the best either.  Possible uses for this anchor:

-Search engines could take a user directly to the desired location in the page
-Browsers could do highlighting
-Browsers could offer prev/next functions that would go to the next occurence and modify the URI to reflect the change in position
-Bookmarks could be made to specific locations in a static page

The actual choice of format would probably have to be different.  #search/3, #3search, ...

Hoping for feedback (subscribed to the list),
Jason Wies aka Zone

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2001 16:33:12 UTC