Re: [platform-help-dev] What info will be returned on search hit lists?

[birsan@xxxxxxxxxx]

Leigh, in principle I agree with the motivation for presenting search
results in a more meaningful manner, whatever that may be.
For HTML documents, <title> is a good candidate, but when the help
documents are XML files (appropriately styled), this won't work, unless we
treat each document type differently.
Right now, the document type(html, xml, pdf, etc.) is almost ignored by the
help system, and all the presentation (table of contents, search results,
etc.) is done based on the navigation/TOC information.
Currently, the UI design presents the Search view as just another
navigation/TOC view, and there is less screen estate for displaying bits of
the result documents like in a regular web search result list.
I would favor a design that allows different search result presentations,
all based on the navigation titles, but with the ability to turn on/off the
parent/path, and maybe some other options (sort by ..., etc.)

For example, for the following TOC

Debugging
      Java
      C++
      JSP
Compiling
      Java
      C++
      JSP

if the search results were:

 Java
 JSP

then one could turn on the path/parent and get

Java - Debugging
JSP - Debugging

or

Debugging - Java
Debugging - JSP


The question that I have (and here I must claim complete ignorance on the
matter): how difficult is it to author documents and navigation so that
topic labels match the titles, and have them short enough to avoid TOC
cluttering, but also long enough to be meaningful by themselves, with the
parent context?

-dorian




                                                                                                                   
                    Leigh                                                                                          
                    Davidson/Toronto/IBM@IBMC       To:     platform-help-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx                          
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                    Sent by:                        Subject:     [platform-help-dev] What info will be returned on 
                    platform-help-dev-admin@e        search hit lists?                                             
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                    02/12/2002 04:34 PM                                                                            
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I'm not sure how closely this is tied to the search engine that you select
for V2. This posting is to suggest that search hits should display the
<title> tag of the target file, plus possibly some portion of the target
file's body (first few lines or, as google seems to return, snippets of
lines that contain the search arguments).

As Kari Halsted specified in her list of req'ts on Nov 21/2001, the IBM ID
community was previously asking to have <h1> tags returned. In offline
discussion, it was pointed out that different adopters of Eclipse might use
<h_> tags in different ways or might not use them at all, whereas <title>
tags are probably more predictable/appropriate.

Our least favorite option is to return text strings from the table of
contents. We would like to uncouple t.o.c. strings from search hits, so
that we have the option of making t.o.c. entries concise (let users derive
context from parent/grandparent text) but search hits more complete (let
user derive context from the wording of the hit).

Leigh Davidson
Editor, IBM Canada Lab
Phone: 416-313-1034
email: ldavidso@xxxxxxxxxx

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