[whatwg] Textarea Wishlist

[Edmund Lai]

This is suggestion for WFN, where N is a large number. Add a button
for spell check of a textarea.

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 23:47:50 +0100, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Ryan Johnson wrote:
> >
> >>3) Extensible syntax highlighting (coloring). I am aware that a ton of
> >>code editors don't even do this well. The ability to load a syntax
> >>definition file and have it color a block of code would do wonders for
> >>making the web a more friendly place to script.
> >
> >
> > This is hard. ;-) Would be nice though. Noted for Web Apps.
> 
> I was having thoughts about a somewhat similar feature - the ability to
> specify a input 'language' for a text-area and possibly to specify a
> subset of language elements allowed. This would principally be for
> situations in which the input was text supplemented by a markup language
> such as (x)html, textile, bbcode or similar. Providing this information
> would allow the UA to provide word-processor-like editing controls for
> the textarea. Allowing the specification of a particular subset of the
> language (e.g. html, 'a' elements only, 'href' and 'lang' attributes
> only) would allow the UI to be further refined. Clearly one would need a
> set of default language profiles to ship with the UA. A good
> implementation might allow the set of profiles to be easily extended.
> There would need to be a mechanism for storing and fetching the
> information about the allowed subset of the language.
> 
>  From the point of view of the textarea, this would require two new
> attributes -  inputformat and inputprofile where inputformat is a
> string/uri identifying the language being  used and inputprofile is a
> URI pointing at a resource describing the subset of the language that is
> allowed. This is not the difficult part, however. The difficult part is
> finding a suitable format for describing the allowed subset. For
> XML-like languages (HTML, BBcode, etc.) DTD or some other schema format
> might be appropriate (but might be too complex?). For other types of
> languages like 'magic character' languages (textile, wiki formats), it's
> not quite so clear what would work (one could avoid supporting these
> formats in the hope that with a good enough editing environment, people
> might use plain HTML but that might be a mistaken hope).
> 
> There is some evidence that this functionality is desired - for example
> the BBCode addon for Firefox [1]
> 
> I'm not expecting anything to come of this unless someone can convince
> me it's much easier to implement than it appears.
> 
> [1] http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/bbcode
> 
> --
> "If anybody ever tells you that you're using the language incorrectly,
> just yell 'prescriptive grammarian!' at the top of your voice and all
> the linguists in the building will run over and surround the guy... and
> then they'll rough him up"
>