[whatwg] Spellchecking proposal #2

[James Graham]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
>> Check spelling:
>> ( ) Never
>> (*) As the page author suggests
>> ( ) Always

This isn't actually strictly necessary at all - one can imagine the 
setting being on a per field basis with the author value representing 
the default and the user being able to choose via the context menu 
(Firefox has a similar system to this but it doesn't seem to remember 
your selection between page visits). Of course it's less obvious how 
this would override the DOM method so a sufficiently determined author 
could reset all the values every few ms using a timer.

> But that really brings out the foolishness of the idea. I can imagine a
> user looking at that option and thinking "Duh - how on earth is the page
> author ever going to know when and how I want spelling checked?"
> 
> What use cases did we come up with where there might be a <textfield> or
> <textfield type="text/plain"> where having spell checking always on
> would cause problems? Surely the worst that could happen would be some
> inappropriate red squiggly underlines. Hardly a disaster.

The only sensible use case that has been suggested so far is for online 
email apps which allow > 1 email addresses in an <input type="text"> - 
in this case none of the text will be recognized by the spellchecker vs. 
an <input type="text"> which contains an email subject line, which 
should be spellchecked.