[whatwg] Spellchecking mark III

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Agreed.  This feature lives purely in user-space.  It can be
convenient for a user to be able to turn off spellchecking globally,
or perhaps even locally (FF exposes this currently through a
right-click option on editable areas), but I cannot see any reason for
an author to have control over this.  If I want to spellcheck an area,
I want to spellcheck it.  If I don't, I don't.

~TJ