[whatwg] Spellchecking mark III

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Dec 30, 2008, at 4:55 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:38:42 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> In 2006 I proposed the following spec for a spellcheck="" attribute,
>> based on requests from the Google engineers then working on Firefox:
>>
>>   http://www.damowmow.com/playground/spellcheck.txt
>>
>> The same engineers have since implemented this feature in Chrome  
>> also, and
>> Google does use this attribute on its sites. However, the attribute  
>> has
>> seen very little interest outside of Google, with just a handful of  
>> sites
>> using it, primarily in dyanamic editor libraries.
>>
>> I have therefore not added this feature to HTML5 for the time  
>> being. If
>> there is more interest in this feature, please speak up.
>
> Opera wants to support this feature as well in due course, so I  
> don't think we would mind it being added to HTML5. Does it being in  
> Chrome mean it is also WebKit? If so, together with Firefox support,  
> seems like a compelling reason to add the feature.

The Google Chrome team has not submitted patches for such a feature to  
WebKit. I am not sure if they plan to eventually submit it to mainline  
WebKit. In fact, this is the first I've heard about Chrome having such  
an extension.

It's not clear to me whether the feature is useful without seeing some  
motivating examples. WebKit by default spellchecks (and grammar  
checks) all editable parts of the document, and it is not obvious to  
me why one would want to force it off for particular form controls or  
editable HTML areas.

Regards,
Maciej