[whatwg] Tag Proposal: spelling

[Charles Pritchard]

On 12/11/2010 1:51 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
> On 29 November 2010 20:58, Charles Pritchard<chuck at jumis.com>  wrote:
>> Currently, there's no way for an author to markup spelling errors in text.
>> A [spelling] tag would address that deficiency.
>>
>> This could be used for a number of reasons, from [sic]-style annotations, to
>> conveying to the user that an area is misspelled using the same visual cues
>> as contenteditable.
> There are other use-cases for markup which tells, say, translation
> software to treat certain strings as literals, not to be translated
> (scientific terms like species' or drugs; trade names; postal
> addresses, people's names, etc.
>
> Consider translating: "John Grey saw a Grey Wagtail while walking down
> Grey Street in his grey coat" into, say, German.
>
> "John Grey" and "Grey Street" should remain untranslated.
>
> "Grey Wagtail" should become "Gebirgsstelze"
>
> Only in "grey coat" should "grey" be translated ("grauen Mantel")
>
> The draft species microformat<http://microformats.org/wiki/species>
> addresses the wagtail example (see also the 2003 ietf-languages
> discussion of language values for taxonomic names
> <http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-February/000574.html>),
> but what of the rest?

For lack of a better solution, perhaps you can provide an extended 
language tag:

<div contenteditable lang="en-GB">
<span aria-invalid="false" lang="en-GB-x-John-Grey">John Grey</span> saw 
a...
</div>

The aria attribute could let the spelling software know the string is 
not misspelled,
and the lang attribute marks it as an English phrase, helpful with 
transliteration.

Does that work?

-Charles