Search the Site

How to Search

The Webcompliant.co.uk search facility is powered by *Swish-e and *Perl. All searches are case-insensitive.

You will need to decide first Where to Search and then the Search Term to use, as follows:

Where to Search

The first thing you need to decide is to which parts of a page to apply your search (it is only the main content of a page which may be searched - navigation menus and page footers are not indexed).

You can restrict your search to any of the following six locations (using the select list in the form above):

1. In a Page Title only (the main title for the page, not sub-titles within a page) - this is the default option
2. In references to Elements only (e.g. a search for "span" will return pages which refer to the span element)
   • For a list of elements, see the Element Index
3. In references to Attributes only (e.g. a search for "span" will return pages which refer to the span attribute)
   Note: to search for xml:lang, accept-charset or http-equiv attributes, the full attribute name must be used - e.g. "http" is not enough to search for "http-equiv", although the wildcard term http* will find it.
   • For a list of attributes, see the Attribute Index
4. In references to Modules only (e.g. a search for "image" will return pages which refer either to the Client-side Image Map Module or to the Server-side Image Map Module)
   • For a list of modules, see the Module Index
5. In references to Attribute Types only (e.g. a search for "script" will return pages which refer to the Script Attribute Type)
   • For a list of attribute types, see Attribute Types
6. Anywhere in a page (any text within the main page content) - this is the most general option

Note: There is no facility to restrict your search to a particular section of the site. Note also that the search page itself is not indexed and will not be returned as a result (and neither is the Interactive Colour Palette).

Search Term

One you have decided where you want to search, you need to construct a suitable search term in the text box. This may be as simple as a single word, multiple words (all of which must be present for a result to match, i.e. default boolean operator is AND), phrases (delimited by double quotes) or boolean constructs. All search terms are case-insensitive: searching for PRE will return the same results as searching for pre.

Matches are against whole words only - for example, if you want to search for all words beginning with the string "image", you must use the wildcard expression image*, which will match "image", "images", "imaged", etc.

The only characters which may appear in your search term are:

1. The word characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and _
2. Spaces (but any leading or trailing spaces are removed and multiple spaces are converted to single spaces)
3. Double quotes characters: " (used to delimit phrases or to actually search for words which are also boolean operators, e.g. "near")
4. Parentheses: ( and ) (used to group terms logically in order to achieve the correct boolean meaning)
5. Colons and hyphens: : and - (but only as part of one of the three buzzwords: accept-charset, http-equiv or xml:lang)
6. The wildcard character, asterisk: * (matches zero or more characters - but may only be used once per search term and only at the end of a word)
7. The wildcard character, question-mark: ? (matches exactly one character - but only if no * characters are present - this may not begin a word)

Any other input will result in an error.

You can refer to the *Swish-e Searching Instructions for more details - these instructions are intended for command-line searching but broadly-speaking apply here, subject to the restrictions in the list above (also, word stemming is not enabled).