<div class="gmail_quote">2009/1/26 Křištof Želechovski <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kkz@mimuw.edu.pl">kkz@mimuw.edu.pl</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128); font-family: Arial; ">Q: Should the
localization influence the spell checking mechanism?</span><br></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">A: Definitely, since the
user is likely to write most messages in his preferred UI language.</span></font></p></div></div></blockquote><div>Which is why this is a perfectly valid input for the heuristic the UA uses to determine the checking language.</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div lang="PL" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div><p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"></span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Q: Is GMail a use case
for having spell check without specifying a language to check against?</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">A: No, it is not.</span></font></p></div></div></blockquote><div>You don't provide any reason why not. "The user is likely to write most messages in his preferred UI language" (which is not true of all users, but leaving that aside) does not imply "the user will write all messages exclusively in his preferred UI language". Therefore gmail cannot (correctly) specify the spellchecking language of editable fields. Therefore the UA must decide. Unless the probable input language of a particular field differs from that of the rest of the page, there's no reason for gmail to specify the probable input language of that field. There is no benefit to conflating this concept with "should this field be spellchecked".</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div lang="PL" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div><p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"></span></font></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128); font-family: Arial; ">Q: In case when the user
decides to use another language, is the user agent free to detect it?</span><br></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">A: Yes, it is, unless the
language specified is private, which means the field was not intended for
checking.</span></font></p></div></div></blockquote><div>Again, this is needless conflation. You gain nothing, and lose both clarity and flexibility, by mapping "don't spellcheck" to "specify the language as private" in this way. In terms of the semantics of the page, this is extremely confusing, sicne whether a field should be spellchecked and what language it's in are nearly orthogonal concepts.</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div lang="PL" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div><p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"></span></font></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128); font-family: Arial; ">Q: When the language
recognition technology advances to an acceptable state, will it be possible to
extend the language attribute to explicitly request automatic identification of
the language?</span><br></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">A: Yes, it is. Just specify
lang="auto" or whatever is agreed upon.</span></font></p></div></div></blockquote><div>There is no benefit to forcing authors to say lang="auto". What have you gained? What if they _don't_ say this? (The HTML5 spec must still say what the UA behavior is.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Language detection libraries today are already extremely good, far more reliable than anything explicitly set ahead of time by authors _or_ users. Unless I am completely misunderstanding you, I think your suggestions fail to solve the original use cases for the spellcheck attribute, add needless burden on web authors, and would be completely ignored by UAs who wished to provide a good user experience.</div>
<div><br></div><div>PK <br></div></div>