[whatwg] Exposing spelling/grammar suggestions in contentEditable

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com
Fri Dec 3 00:38:00 PST 2010


On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
<bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Allowing UAs explicitly to provide information via dedicated optional
> fields is different to requiring UAs them to leak it in the course of
> providing another service (such as spelling).

It's worth noting that in practice UAs have identifying traits that
can leak through feature/bug detection (e.g. "typeof opera", testing
if vendor-prefixed styles are applied, conditional comments and
compilation, and so forth). In the case of UAs like Konqueror and
Internet Explorer, UA identification is a good proxy for OS detection
too. Other than helping and encouraging privacy-conscious users to
disable untrusted JS, I don't think UAs can do much about that.

To a lesser extent, such traits are also an issue at the HTTP level.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis



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