[whatwg] Proposal: Input Method Editor API

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2011, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
> 2011/1/8 Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>
> 
> > I understand that it might be helpful for pages to contribute data to
> > IMEs, e.g. so that an IME doing text prediction can offer predictions
> > based on words the site knows the user might type (e.g. names from the
> > user's contacts list on the site). However, what's the use case for the
> > page writing its own IME from scratch?
> 
> Off the top of my head,
> 
>    1. Users may not have sufficient privileges to install an IME - If I'm
>    going to an internet cafe in the U.S., I wouldn't expect computers to have
>    East Asian IMEs installed.  Web page that requires Chinese, Japanese,
>    Korean, etc... can provide suitable IMEs so that users can use it.

That helps with those Web pages, but the Web has trillions of pages. It 
seems rather backwards to be trying to fix the problem with an Internet 
cafe not having an IME installed by instead trying to put that IME on all 
the pages the user is going to visit, just in case.

Better to fix the Internet cafe.


>    2. Not all IMEs are free - web page could provide an IME when the client
>    doesn't have one

Competing with IMEs at the page level rather than by simply providing a 
free native IME seems like the wrong solution.


>    3. Some IMEs are better than others - web page supposedly can provide a
>    better IME.

Why not just provide a better native IME?


On Sat, 8 Jan 2011, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 
> An IME is something you want, consistently, on every page you visit.  
> You don't want every webpage to have a different, inconsistent IME, to 
> have to configure IMEs on each page, etc.  OS's without a needed IME 
> installed are an issue, but implementing it in each webpage isn't the 
> right fix.

I have to agree with Glenn here.


On Tue, 11 Jan 2011, Hironori Bono (Ë·Ìî Çîŵ) wrote:
> 
> Even though my use case are almost the same, I think of another use
> case: writing an IME used for automated compliance tests.

Automated compliance tests can run custom software that have their own 
IMEs or testing APIs, there's no need for the page to provide one.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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