Re: Client-side highlighting; tag proposal

> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 11:26:56 +0500
> From: billo@grinch.hq.ileaf.com (Bill O'Donnell x3378)

> 
> Given what (little) I know about Verity Topics, these highlight tags,
> whether in an HTML header as Wayne suggests, or in a separate "query
> result" document that Nick might be suggesting (if my understanding is
> correct), would contain more than just the words to be highlighted.
> They would also contains hints about where to locate the words in
> the HTML documents, which in the case of VTK would be a word count.
> Since the search engine has already done the work of locating words,
> we might as well give the browser the opportunity to leverage that
> work. 
> 
> I'd like to see a proposal/discussion of some standard locator hints
> that different search engines might provide.  VTK might provide word
> count, for example, where Fulcrum might provide character count
> perhaps?  In any case, the search engine would provide whatever info
> it can in some standard way, and browsers could use that to their
> advantage. 
> 
> Something like:
> 
> <hl href=URL wordloc=WORDCOUNT charloc=CHARCOUNT>
> This is the phrase found
> </hl>
> <hl href=URL2 wordloc=WORDCOUNT2 charloc=CHARCOUNT2>
> This is another phrase found
> </hl>
> 
> I don't even care if this is done through an HTML tag or not, as long
> as there is some convention that browsers can use.

I would be very uncomfortable with the integrity of extrenal 
addresses suggested by the attributes in the reference link.
At least with a fragment-id there is a loose contract between 
generated (e.g. original document annotated with highlighting and
temporal search result navigation anchors) and the presentation
of a result list (e.g. temporal query result page).

An interesting side effect of your suggested syntax, is that a
result list could describe regions to be highlighted in plain text, 
postscript, or "externally stored in a database" document.

<hl href="sql://db/select%20from%20employees%20lastname%20;
     row=1 col=1> Henderson </hl>

<hl href="foo.ps" page=3 x=10 y=20 w=100 h=12>... </hl>


Yes, I have an adopted greyhound and her name is Pandora :-)

Received on Friday, 10 March 1995 11:57:04 UTC