From the webpage:
Inspired by twitter.com‘s autocomplete search functionality, typeahead.js is a fast and fully-featured autocomplete library.
…
Features
- Displays suggestions to end-users as they type
- Shows top suggestion as a hint (i.e. background text)
- Works with hardcoded data as well as remote data
- Rate-limits network requests to lighten the load
- Allows for suggestions to be drawn from multiple datasets
- Supports customized templates for suggestions
- Plays nice with RTL languages and input method editors
Why not use X?
At the time Twitter was looking to implement a typeahead, there wasn’t a solution that allowed for prefetching data, searching that data on the client, and then falling back to the server. It’s optimized for quickly indexing and searching large datasets on the client. That allows for sites without datacenters on every continent to provide a consistent level of performance for all their users. It plays nicely with Right-To-Left (RTL) languages and Input Method Editors (IMEs). We also needed something instrumented for comprehensive analytics in order to optimize relevance through A/B testing. Although logging and analytics are not currently included, it’s something we may add in the future.
A bit on the practical side for me, ;-), but I can think of several ways that autocompletion could be useful with a topic map interface.
Not just the traditional completion of a search term or phrase but offering possible roles for subjects already in a map and other uses.
If experience with XML and OpenOffice is any guide, the easier authoring becomes (assuming the authoring outcome is useful), the greater the adoption of topic maps.
It really is that simple.
I first saw this at: typeahead.js : Fully-featured jQuery Autocomplete Library.