December 19th, 2004 | No Comments

Live Search Added

You may notice that a new section has appeared on the homepage called “Live Search”; typing in the input box produces a list of results from both the blog and linkage sections.

The interesting bit about this is that it uses a technology called XMLHttpRequest - I can tell you’ve switched off already - which in a nutshell allows parts of a page to be updated dynamically, without the need to refresh the whole page.

This particular piece of code is based on (OK, pretty much lifted) from the BifFlux LiveSearch Wiki.

There are a few amendments needed to make it accessible, in particular to be able to navigate it with the keyboard and to fail gracefully in non-Javascript enabled browsers (perhaps redirect to a results page?), but generally I think it works pretty well and is a pointer towards how this technology can be used in other web applications.

Also available on the WorkBench, (with a write hopefully appearing soon), although the link to BitFlux above pretty much gives all the details needed to get it set up.

This technology is also behind the interesting Google Suggest Tool.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 19th, 2004 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Blog, WV4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.