That and there's no HTML way to interactively load results. Or are you really going to serialize half a million records to HTML and transfer it all every time the relevant block is added to a page? What if it sits in the header or footer templates?

This would be possible in XSLT, if only browsers would implement the latest spec rather than abandoning it all together.

Right, I sort of expected there to be an attribute for an url.

   <datalist json="search.php?q=toyota+corolla">

Static could be better too. When search engines first started building these auto complete dropdowns the multi word input was really the killer feature. To have something like "green toyota" you would have to generate an element for all color and brand combinations? And the you want it to work for "green toyota corolla" and you get an abc kind of list length.

Perhaps a wildcard would have been fun or regex options.

  <option value="* days"></option>
  <option value="* weeks"></option>
  <option value="* years"></option>