[whatwg] <input type="text" accept="">

[Matthew Raymond]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> What about <input class="spellcheck" />? It surely validates with  
> HTML4, and it doesn't get in the way of any other feature. It does  
> not really need to be part of the HTML spec either.

   This is nothing more than storing boolean attribute values as
classes. It's essentially a validation hack.

> I know that according to the current spec, the class attribute should  
> carry no meaning whatsoever. But I ask the question: is this worse  
> than implying that spell checking should be enabled or disabled based  
> on a particular MIME type? The later could break spell checking when  
> introducing new text types, say "text/x-markdown", or "text/x- 
> mediawiki", for lightweight formatting syntaxes.

   MIME types allow for things other than spell checking, like syntax
highlighting and UI for tag insertion. For those purposes, a MIME type
would actually be quite useful. I'd agree that it's a poor fit for spell
checking, but considering there have already been suggestions for
specifying the dictionary file to be used for spell checking, I suspect
a simple true/false approach to spell check support may be too limited.