[whatwg] Spellchecking proposal #2

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:26:31 +0700, Sander Tekelenburg  
<tekelenb at euronet.nl> wrote:

>> Authors should set the document's language information, to enable user
>> agents to accurately determine which dictionary to use when checking
>> the spelling or grammar of user input.

> IMO this "should" should be a "must". We're going see truckloads of sites
> that have spellcheck=on, simply because authoring tools will insert it by
> default, that don't bother to specify a language. The user-agent will  
> then have to revert to the local default language, which can be a  
> serious problem for all those milions whose default language is  
> something else than
> the webpage's language and who allow spellcheck to be on.

The language to use for spellchecking is, in general, different from the  
language that the webpage is written in. For example, when entering a blog  
entry into textarea, the user is more likely to write in his native  
language, which is also the local default language of his user agent, than  
in the language which the blogging application's UI is in. Using the local  
default language seems more appropriate here.

Even worse: when entering text in textarea, the user actually has a choice  
which language to write in. I think the user agent should provide, besides  
just the control to turn spellchecking on and off, a choice of languages.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com