[whatwg] Spellchecking proposal #2

[Lachlan Hunt]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:59 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>>
>> Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>> ...
>>> But realistically, browsers won't "allow the user to easily override 
>>> it if they want to", because any interface for doing that would be 
>>> absurd.
>> ...
>> I'm sure there are other people that know a lot more about UI design 
>> than I do, who could come up with some really creative and usable.
> 
> The problem is not with which GUI controls you choose; it's with the 
> amount of attention demanded by the underlying situation. Spellchecking 
> would seemingly be turning itself off for a completely non-obvious 
> reason; and to make it obvious, you would have to make the spellchecking 
> feature more prominent than its importance permits.

That would happen with either the author specified attribute approach, 
or the heuristics approach where browsers make an educated guess based 
on the semantics and surrounding content.

The only way that wouldn't happen is if spell checking was completely 
controlled by the user, so that it remains in the state it was last set 
to for all controls; or defaults to being either on or off for every 
control, regardless of what the user last specified.  In thpse cases, 
it's arguably more important for the spell checking control to be more 
prominent in the UI.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/