[whatwg] Proposal in supporting the writing of "Arabizi"

[Sami Eljabali]

Thanks Mark for the clarification, and thanks all for the feedback. To the
valid point however, regarding the result of bloated web browsers storing
each language's dictionary, I feel more thought could be put in swaying
IME's off OSs, as it is limiting in availability for all. That said,
couldn't we have have  'dictionary look-ups' be served as a service? It
could follow the search services model available today, where users choose
their provider to be used by the browser itself. This would allow room for
providers to even emerge given possible incentives or others including
noting trends circulating via users speaking x,y, or z languages. Worst
case, one could look into a peer-to-peer solution, where users donate their
bandwidth/cpu for others. Your thoughts on this are appreciated.

Thanks for your time,
-Sami

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:28 PM, Mark Callow <callow_mark at hicorp.co.jp>wrote:

> I think what is being requested by the OP is very very different from
> the things being requested in the W3C bugs linked from the below
> referenced wiki page (which seem like good ideas, but please ensure that
> '+' can be entered in phone numbers).
>
> As Sergiusz Wolicki pointed the OP is requesting an IME and IMEs already
> exist for several languages. The corollary of this is that hooks for
> IMEs exist in all major operating systems. As Sergiusz also pointed out,
> users will want this functionality available in any text field.  I think
> it would be better to develop an Arabic IME for the OS rather than
> embedding it in browsers. Maybe such a thing already exists.
>
> Have you any idea of the size of the dictionary and supporting data
> needed for the Japanese IME? It is quite large. I do not think browser
> vendors will want to bloat their products with large IME dictionaries
> for even one language so any browser-based IMEs will inevitably become
> separate downloads. In which case there is no benefit compared to a
> separately downloaded OS-based IME and the disadvantage that it can't be
> used with any text field on the system.
>
> Regards
>
>    -Mark
>
>
> On 02/12/2011 03:36, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 1:07 AM, Sami Eljabali <seljabali at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >> *Proposal:*
> >>
> >> Have the interpreter described above be embedded within browsers and
> >> enabled when users click and focus on text fields defined as: <input
> >> type="text" lang="arabizi"> to interpret
> >> Arabizi<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet>as Arabic.
> >> Should a browser not support it, then the <input type="text"> would be
> the
> >> fallback attribute leaving users writing in a plain text field.
> > We are looking into something like this for many languages.  I've
> > attempted to record this as a use-case on
> > <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Text_input_keyboard_mode_control>, but I
> > can't figure out how to upload images yet.  Once I do, I'll add
> > screenshots, an explanation, and a link to this thread.
>