Wow, what a conversation. Goba invited me to look onto the conversation and add my input.
I am personally disappointed that the swf version was seemingly dismissed without much intellectual conversation. Now. Lets talk about size optimization. I am not sure if someone has already tried the ideas I have but here they are: I would have tried a different compression, however, this one may work better as long as the list is all ways alphabetical. To optimize the list further, I would pick several hex characters, preferably in a row that will not occur in a function name. We use these instead of the 123 characters because we can add a default of no value. We would have to pick what the best default value was. It will probably end up being the value that was before it. This would effectively reduce some space and would also make it near to imposable for someone to edit the file in a text editor. This means the file will have to be created by a bot. The second idea that I think may be good was discussed a little earlier. Break the string up into a single string per letter. After the user types the first letter of the search word, the drop down list would download and appear. Lets think about how may users are going to type e.. c.. h.o and wait for all the words to come up? Most (I think) would type something like ech..o after they see that the last letter is in fact o. This should give us a little time to load a little file. In my case, I would rather wait a bit for a small file to load rather then go to a search not found page. But I would also rather not wait for a file to load(even if it did load at the begining) if I know what I wanted (and I normally do.) Is anyone following my argument? Fast first page. If you know what you want, don't wait for small file (if you can beat it) and if you don't know what you want, wait a sec. We could group xy_1234567890 and any other non-liked or otherwise cast out letters by using php re-directs. I would also hesitate to include all the js needed to run the script in the download file. Brendan
