- From: John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 09:28:51 -0600
- To: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
A feature quite similar to what is being discussed here has been available for some time in the WN server. Matching items from full text searches are enclosed in named anchors. This has the effect of highlighting them, but also allows the browser to bring up the document with positioned at the match. Thus the response to the search is a list of documents with sublists of lines containing a match with the search term highlighted. Selecting the highlighted term takes you to the relevant document postioned at the match. Selecting the highlighted search term in the document takes you to the beginning of the document. You can try this with a demo which searches the 39 files of the HTML 2.0 specification at <URL:http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/html2.0/dosearch.html> By the way, tagging a search term match is not a simple matter in HTML. Very often the match is in an anchor which does not allow an additional tag. And simply deciding whether or not a match is in an anchor requires parsing the whole document in principal (but a few neighboring lines seems to work fine in practice). Then there is the question of what to do if the match is in a place which allows no tag. -- John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University john@math.nwu.edu
Received on Friday, 10 March 1995 10:28:20 UTC