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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>don't capture Ctrl+F preventing me from using the browser search.

Browser search only searches visible text in the DOM. For performance reasons the whole page might not be loaded into the DOM. This means the default browser search will provide incomplete results.

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Maybe, but maybe (usually) that's exactly what I wanted. Browser search has well-defined semantics, many of which are useful in ways that are not exactly 'searching the content'. These are semantically different things and overloading the shortcut is frustrating. Use a different shortcut for your incompatible functionality. For example I might use Ctrl-F to look for a UI element like 'Contact Us' that's hidden at the bottom of the page, or to refer to a stanza I read a minute or two ago without trying to find it with my eyes and the scroll bar. Or even to try to find where what I searched for appears when I have clicked on a search result. This last one is especially frustrating.

If I specifically want to search the entire corpus of data on an infinitely-scrolling site, I will use its search function intentionally, since that is a semantically different action.

This isn't some insolvable problem. Just have a separate search box and use that for cross-pagination/serverside search. Use a separate hotkey for it, like '/', as many sites do, and leave ctrl-F for the browser search.

if you cannot load the whole page for any reason, that's a failure of design. use pagination, that has existed since the 90s.

default ctrl-f will only search through the current page while the site-provided one can search through all content... this is not really an argument against it existing

so can a POST form request. why people feel the need to reinvent stuff that's existed for decades is beyond me

How does the user know which search to use? Ctrl-F vs search box with POST.

Forcing a request what could be done locally is bad design.

By longstanding convention. Ctrl-F is the conventional in-page search combo, while a dedicated search field is the conventional website search engine.

You can even use the OpenSearch description and move the search field to the browsers'.

But it's about inpage search, it's just a lazy loading page.

The dedicated search field is for searching my websites and the result would be a list of my pages that contain the search term. Ctrl-F jumps to the location of the search term on the page I'm already at.

Reminds me of that sort story (Asimov? Seems like him) where someone hits on the genius idea of printing thing out of the computer to read later and, after a few false starts including gigantic billboards which you have to read using sliding ladders, hits on the astounding trick of gluing thin sheets of text into portable stacks joined by one edge.

AKA books.

Well, strictly speaking it's a Holmes-Ginsbook Device, but if you want to be informal about it...

Why paginate when it doesn't make sense? I don't want a pastebin to be spread over multiple pages. I want the text file to show up on one page, but to not cause any performance issues. I want to be able to search for any line in that text file without having to search each page.

How does pagination solve the search problem?

The content you can find wih the browser search still doesn't do d the text on another page. A custom search could including a jump to the page.

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