#3312 NORM First D: Browser text window should have auto complete

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#3312: Browser text window should have auto complete
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  Reporter:  kimquirk          |       Owner:  erikos                
      Type:  enhancement       |      Status:  new                   
  Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  First Deployment, V1.0
 Component:  interface-design  |     Version:                        
Resolution:                    |    Keywords:                        
  Verified:  0                 |  
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Changes (by Eben):

 * cc: marco, erikos, michael, HoboPrimate (added)
  * owner:  Eben => erikos


Comment:

 The mockup on the wiki provides pretty good insight into the desired
 design: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Activity_browse_url.jpg

 Here are a few bullet points on the behavior:

  - The auto-completed text should appear to the right of the cursor while
 typing
  - The auto-completed text should be selected (This way, a single press of
 the delete key will remove it)
  - The auto-complete match should always be the shortest of any matching
 strings (This will ensure that the first suggestion is the top level one,
 preventing the user from typing www.something.com [enter] and having some
 longer auto-completed subdirectory path from actually being loaded
 instead.)
  - The auto-completion should match first on URLs, second on page titles.
 Obviously, titles may not be unique.  When they aren't unique, we should
 prefer the one with highest frequency  ( #of visits)
  - the matching should be "startswith" style, such that the match doesn't
 appear anywhere within the URL...it should be a completion.  However, it
 should ignore prefixes (protocol and such) intelligently, such that "lap"
 matches "http://laptop.org" and "apple" matches "http://www.apple.com."
 Only the string to the right of the match should be filled in within the
 URL bar while typing.
  - The auto-completions should be suggested in the window beneath the URL
 bar.  It should list them in frequency order.
  - We can skip the icons on the left for now
  - We can skip the thumbnails for now; we probably will only have
 thumbnails for session/global bookmarks anyway, not for the entire history
 (maybe we can cache thumbnails for all history, but not keep them
 permanently?)
  - Keeping the relative date for each would be ''really'' helpful (a
 reason to move to public API?) in terms of identifying the right one.
  - Clicking one with the mouse, or selecting one with the enter key should
 immediately begin loading the chosen URL.
  - We should pick a reasonable number to cap the suggestions list at, I
 think.  I don't believe that scrolling should be used here.  Maybe a max
 of the top 10 suggestions?

 Please note that this entire system depends on cross-session data storage.
 This is a really powerful example use case for it, though.  Perhaps the
 system can provide a secure cross-session storage location that's
 independent of the DS for such purposes?

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3312#comment:3>
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