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

[daniels@xxxxxxxxxx]

<delurks>

I prefer the approach of returning the contents of <title> (or the
equivalent element depending on which DTD the help is authored in). Mind
you, pulling the text from the equivalent of the <title> element in
non-HTML would assume that any text entities in the titles would be
substituted before the search indexes are generated (probably a good
assumption, but I like to make assumptions explicit). I'm not convinced
that we should be too concerned about what to return in the case of PDF, as
I suspect authoring and delivering topic-oriented help in PDF format isn't
a likely approach that Eclipse will need to cover.

The reason that the contents of <title> is far better than just returning
the discrete entry in the navigation tree is that the entry in a good
navigation tree is generally a greatly truncated version of the fully
descriptive title. As Leigh points out, the context provided by the
hierarchy of the navigation tree (the "breadcrumb trail") assists the user
in understanding the information likely to be provided by the topic. If we
can't return the full title of the topic, then returning the breadcrumb
trail is a good alternative. (Assumption: the title in the topic is a fully
descriptive title.)

It sounds like returning keywords in context (KWIC) is beyond the
capabilities of the search system in the near future. This concerns me a
bit from a competitiveness perspective; KWIC has been a staple of indices
and good search systems for decades. I guess I hoped that we would be able
to provide a similar function in Eclipse. (Assumption: we're out to build a
best of breed development platform.)

If there _is_ any possibility of generating KWIC results from search, I
would certainly want to know about it so we could avoid asking authors to
provide summaries of each topic to satisfy search + introductory material
to provide context for a writer landing on a topic from a search result or
related link.

Dan

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Dan Scott
Email: daniels@xxxxxxxxxx

</delurks>