[whatwg] Search-suggestions without scripting

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 7 May 2012, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> On 5/5/12, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > Note that even in this space, though, it's not the end of the story. 
> > For example, Chrome does more than just list the search autocomplete 
> > results; it also loads the first suggestion in the background, and 
> > mixes in results from local history search, etc. Other browsers do 
> > similar mixing. While this works well for browser UI, where the 
> > browser can mix in all the various results together, when you are 
> > talking about a Web page you still end up needing script to do that. 
> > So having it declarative isn't necessarily a win.
>
> Mixing multiple sources, such as user history and site suggestions, and 
> automatically performing actions upon them, such as prefetch and 
> prerender, should be easier for the user agent to do if the necessary 
> information to do so is declared, no?

My point wasn't that the UA would want to add stuff, but that this kind of 
thing (an autocomplete widget, even one done entirely by and for the page, 
without the browser adding stuff) is in general more complicated than just 
"here's a list of completion suggestions". It's "here's five sources of 
data, let me rank them and figure out how to list them", or "here's a 
bunch of options including a rich entry with graphics", or any number of 
other complicated things.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'