[whatwg] Spellchecking mark III

[Peter Kasting]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Calogero Alex Baldacchino <
alex.baldacchino at email.it> wrote:

> Why not to let the user choose the language, as it happens in word
> processors? A UA can't choose accurately whether, for instance, "color" is a
> correct American English, a wrong British English, or even a correct
> (truncated) Italian word, while a human can do it better, thus a UA could
> provide an interface to change the language for a selection spellchecking,
> or even for each mispelled word, starting from a hint language, which could
> be the value of an element "lang" attribute (beside a default value and a
> user-preference "forced" one - the latter bypassing any authored value).
> Also, using the "lang" attribute value as the start language to check (if
> not in contrast with a user preference) would allow an interactive interface
> with a script changing that value according to a user's choice (UAs could
> also expose a list of supported languages).


I'm not sure I fully grasped everything here, but what I did grasp sounds
very much like a cross between what Chromium is doing today and what we want
to do in the future (I imagine similar things are true for other browser
vendors).  User specification and page hints are both useful tools for a UA.

But I still claim that all of those aspects are outside the scope of the
"spellcheck" attribute, and fall into the realm of "things that should not
be in the HTML5 spec" as they're very much UA-specific behavior.

PK
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