Simple Search interface

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

I've been thinking a lot of how to impliment the Applications dialog in
the simple search page.  I think everyone agrees that the current drop
down list doesn't even begin to scale as we add applications.

The main problem is most solutions require JavaScript, DHTML, or the like
which Lynx doesn't support.

So I talked to our master web developer here at Vicinity about it and did
some brainstorming.  Here's what we came up with:

Since each application is known in the SQL database, we can create a
dialog which allows them to either type in the Application name or type.
A name would be like apache, pine, netscape, etc.  Type would be like web
server, email client, web browser, etc.  We then do a substring match
against the KBObjects:ObjectName field.

We then return back to the user a dropdown list of the matches but also
the other applications in the same category.  Example:

Joe types "Apache".

We find Apache in the "Web Servers" category.  We then find the other
applications in the Web Servers cat, and return as a drop down:

Apache
Netscape
thttpd
Roxen
etc.

Joe could also type in 'email' and we would find the following categories:

Email servers
Email clients

and return in the drop down:
postfix
qmail
smail
sendmail
pine
elm
mutt
netscape
etc.

The advantage of this is that it's completely server side, so it would
work even on Lynx.  Comments?

--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.
aka: aturner@vicinity.com, aturner@pobox.com, ion_beam_head@ashtech.net