Premium DOM Component

Site Search

Full text search with look-ahead autofill

Motivation

The SEMWORDS and SITEWORDS tools (see Site Search ) produce an index of all the words used in a given website. That index is used by this DOM component to provide full text searching on a local basis, without relying on AJAX or direct server interaction.

This DOM component handles the initial fetch of the site index, caching it to the user's local-storage for ready use across all of the website's documents.

Internally, the DOM component uses a ternary search trie to provide partial word lookups as the user types, guiding the user towards better results.

In the wild

To see an example of this component in use, visit the READ WRITE STACK website and press F7 "Search". To understand what's going on under the hood, use the browser's inspector to view the HTML source code and network activity, and follow along as you read this documentation.

Installation

Prerequisites

The rwt-search DOM component works in any browser that supports modern W3C standards. Templates are written using BLUE PHRASE notation, which can be compiled into HTML using the free Read Write View desktop app. It has no other prerequisites. Distribution and installation are done with either NPM or via Github.

Download

Using the DOM component

After installation, you need to add four things to your HTML page to make use of it.

• Add a script tag to load the component's rwt-search.js file:

<script src='/node_modules/rwt-search/rwt-search.js' type=module></script>             

• Add the component tag somewhere on the page.

  • For scripting purposes, apply an id attribute.
  • Apply a sourceref attribute with a reference to the full-text word index file created by the SITEWORDS utility.
  • Optionally, apply a shortcut attribute with something like F2, F4, etc. for hotkey access.
  • And for WAI-ARIA accessibility apply a role=search attribute.

<rwt-search id=search sourceref='/data/sitewords' shortcut=F4 role=search></rwt-search>             

• Add a button for the visitor to click to show the dialog:

<a id=search-button title='Search (F4)'>

🔎

</a>

• Add a listener to respond to the click event:

<script type=module>
    document.getElementById('search-button').addEventListener('click', (e) => {
        document.getElementById('search').toggleDialog(e);
    });
</script>

Customization

Dialog size and position

The dialog is absolutely positioned towards the bottom right of the viewport. Its position and size may be overridden using CSS by defining new values for the variables:

rwt-search {
    --width: 70vw;
    --height: 75vh;
    --bottom: 1rem;
    --right: 1rem;
}

Dialog color scheme

The default color palette for the dialog uses a dark mode theme. You can use CSS to override the variables' defaults:

rwt-search {
    --color: var(--white);
    --accent-color1: var(--pure-white);
    --accent-color2: var(--yellow);
    --accent-color3: var(--js-blue);
    --background: var(--black);
    --accent-background1: var(--medium-black);
    --accent-background2: var(--pure-black);
    --accent-background3: var(--nav-black);
    --accent-background4: var(--black);
}

Internals

The browser's local-storage area is used to cache the sitewords file and the user's most recent search terms. These keys are set by the DOM component:

Life-cycle events

The component issues life-cycle events.

Reference

License

The rwt-search DOM component is not freeware. After evaluating it and before using it in a public-facing website, eBook, mobile app, or desktop application, you must obtain a license from Read Write Tools .

Activation

To activate your license, copy the rwt-registration-keys.js file to the root directory of your website, providing the customer-number and access-key sent to your email address, and replacing example.com with your website's hostname. Follow this example: