[R] HTML help pages

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Unfortunately your suggested change to SearchEngine.html is not valid
JavaScript under Internet Explorer 6: at least APPLET appears to be
recognised under all commonly used browsers.

I found your Javascript search a lot slower under IE6 (and IE6 was a lot
slower than FireFox).  Not that I use IE6 if I can help it, but I suspect
more than 50% of users of R HTML help do.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Damon Wischik wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> > I've always wondered whether there is a
> > way to implement this without java since the java approach has caused so
> > many problems for users and it seems to entail some overhead.
> 
> On my own pages, I've used Javascript for search rather than Java. You can
> see how it works at
>   http://www.wischik.com/damon/Recipe/index/search.html
> The idea is to embed all of the index into the html page in XML-like
> markup, and to have Javascript trawl through this list. Page download time
> should be much the same (with the current R solution, the index file has
> to be downloaded; with the Javascript, the index is downloaded as part of
> the search page.) Searching will be a bit slower; whether that is
> acceptable depends on the size of the index.
> 
> I'm glad to say I've finally got the searching to work in Mozilla Firebird
> 0.7. I think the problem is to do with this:
> * Mozilla Firebird 0.7 requires Java 1.4 or later
> * Java 1.4 from Sun does not properly support the Applet tag.
> 
> The solution (really a dirty non-standard hack), according to the Sun
> documentation, is to use code like the following: 
> 
> <embed type="application/x-java-applet"
>        code="SearchEngine.class"
>        width="0" height="0"
>        id="SearchEngine" 
>        scriptable="true"
>        INDEXFILE="index.txt">
> </embed>
> 
> instead of the current
> 
> <applet
>     code=SearchEngine.class
>     name=SearchEngine
>     width=0
>     height=0 >
>     <param name="INDEXFILE" value="index.txt">
> </applet>
> 
> The official W3C position is that APPLET is deprecated in favour of
> OBJECT, and EMBED is not even mentioned.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595