A preliminary study on OpenSearch application

Many modern browsers have a search box on the right side of the address bar, and Google search is installed by default. As shown below:

In fact, this is an application of OpenSearch. As long as you write the corresponding micro-format xml file, you can formulate the corresponding search box. Referring to the definition document of OpenSearch, you can basically obtain the basic xml format. For example, a typical search xml file can be specified like this.

The above xml file is easy to understand. Except for the fixed xml root, other definitions can be understood literally:

• InputEncoding specifies the encoding of the search, which depends on the actual situation of the website.
• ShortName This is the short name of the search, such as "Google Search"
• Description A description for this search box, such as "Taobao shopping search - only if you can't think of it, you can't find anything you can't find."
• Image is similar to the favicon of a web page, used for identification search
• Url This is the most important parameter, specifying the search link. It has many parameters, generally use the {searchTerms} parameter to specify the search terms. The parameter type="text/html" indicates that the page is returned (the browser will jump to this page). If it is in other formats, it will be opened using the corresponding default program (for example, type="application/rss+xml" will be used) RSS reader open).

Writing OpenSearch's xml format is complete. For detailed information, please refer to its OpenSearch definition document. Next, we need to add this search to the page. There are basically two ways. They are to add link tags in the head of the page (similar to RSS), and to add them using Javascript (such as defining a button to trigger). Adding link tags is very simple, the format is as follows

Similar to RSS, rel and type are fixed. We mainly specify href (the url path of the above xml, to be safe, use the absolute path, that is, starting with http://) and title (that is, the short title of the search). In this way, when you open this page in Explorer and Firefox, you can see the corresponding menu, as shown in the figure:

It is more troublesome to add using Javascript (perhaps the situation will be much better now). We mainly use the browser extension function. There is a window.external.AddSearchProvider parameter in Explorer (detailed documentation). The typical calling method is as follows

The link in the parameter is the content in the above link. Available under Firefox

Parameters and examples are as described in the sample code (official documentation). It is worth noting that Firefox2 and later versions have been "compatible" with Explorer's window.external.AddSearchProvider calling method (details). Then our corresponding Javascript code can be written like this (in order to be compatible with versions before Firefox2, add else if judgment, if you feel it is not necessary, you can not add it)

In this way, you can register this function to the click event of a link or button, and a confirmation box will pop up. As shown in the figure, after the user clicks confirmation, it will be added to the browser search box.