On Jan 17, 2009, at 4:41 AM, Ryan King wrote:
On Jan 16, 2009, at 6:07 AM, Mr. Meitar Moscovitz wrote:
...
In all typical cases, an HTML form element exists on the home pages
of these sites that provides search functionality. However, in a
typical web page, there are many forms, including email
subscription forms, comment forms, and so forth. It would therefore
be beneficial if these forms used standardized semantics such as a
microformat that indicated what kind of functionality they provide.
This way, user agents of various types, e.g., mobile web browsers,
can provide simple yet consistent UI's for such specific
functionality.
So…the above (and more) are my preliminary thoughts on this topic.
What are yours?
This is already covered by HTML5:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#text-state-and-search-
state
-ryan
Hi Ryan,
Apologies on the long email before—it may have not been clear enough.
Though HTML5 does offer a <input type="search">, that fact alone
doesn't specify what the form in which this input element is specified
searches. If I understand correctly, It merely indicates that the form
field itself is "a search field," and so it must adhere to certain
sanitization behaviors and so forth. This is helpful, but by itself
still doesn't tell me what the form will search—the site I'm on? All
of it or a specific section? A site somewhere else?
In the case of a user agent like Mosembro, just trying to find the
first <input type="search"> element isn't enough to identify the form
field to link up to its browser chrome, for example. Trying to find a
combination of <form action="http://the-current-site.tld…";> and the
aforementioned input element might get one closer, but doesn't solve
the case where there are multiple search forms on a single site, such
as the My Yahoo! portal page.
So the idea is that the semantics of the form as a whole need to be
able to aim such tools to particular forms. While Yahoo! and Google's
search APIs are well known, smaller site's often aren't. Each of the
three examples I talked about so far (the two search engines and a
WordPress site), each use different indicators for the HTML that
defines their forms. Making those consistent isn't what the HTML5 spec
is talking about, unless of course I'm misunderstanding the part of
the HTML5 you've linked me to, in which case I'd appreciate the
edification. :)
Cheers,
-Meitar Moscovitz
Personal: http://maymay.net
Professional: http://MeitarMoscovitz.com
_______________________________________________
microformats-new mailing list
microformats-new@microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
