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

[Mark Callow]

Why do you feel it is necessary to sway IME's off OSes? As far as I know
the OS ones are all freely downloadable or included in OS distributions.
The downloadable ones are not even as hard to find as they used to be.
They're needed for all text input fields across the system. They're
complicated enough that I wouldn't want to have to learn different ones
in different applications.

I quite agree about the dictionaries and not just for IMEs. I have a
ridiculous number of English dictionaries installed on my system, e.g.,
one in Thunderbird, one in Firefox, one in MS Office, one in XMLMind,
one in Foxit Reader plus a host of others. I also have separate copies
of the _same_ Japanese dictionaries in Thunderbird and Firefox for use
by the Rikaichan plug-in. However having dictionary look-up only
available as a network service is a very dangerous way to go from the
perspective of civil rights and liberties. It needs to be a service
available locally perhaps with an option to go to the network.

Regards

    -Mark


On 05/12/2011 07:42, Sami Eljabali wrote:
> 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.