- From: Sander Tekelenburg <tekelenb@euronet.nl>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:26:31 +0200
At 16:04 +0000 UTC, on 2006-06-22, Ian Hickson wrote: [...] [AUTHOR REQUIREMENTS] > Authors should set the document's language information, to enable user > agents to accurately determine which dictionary to use when checking > the spelling or grammar of user input. IMO this "should" should be a "must". We're going see truckloads of sites that have spellcheck=on, simply because authoring tools will insert it by default, that don't bother to specify a language. The user-agent will then have to revert to the local default language, which can be a serious problem for all those milions whose default language is something else than the webpage's language and who allow spellcheck to be on. If you make this a "must", that would make it easier for authors to recognise their mistake (by using a validator) and it would allow user-agents to be smarter in such cases -- they could for instance allow the user to configure the user-agent such that spellcheck is on by default, but disabled when a webpage's language is unknown. It would (hopefully) also make it clear to user-agent authors that they will need to offer users a method to quickly and easily change the spellchecker's language, without thereby changing the default settings. > IMPLEMENTATION REQUIREMENTS > > All elements can have spellchecking enabled or disabled. UAs may allow > the user to set this flag Why "may"? Why not "must"? Given that the argument for the spellcheck attribute appears to be "to aid users"... If you allow user-agents to implement a spellcheck attribute the user has no control over, you're handing control to authors. That's generally a bad idea on the Net, but it's especially bad in a case like this. -- Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
Received on Thursday, 22 June 2006 16:26:31 UTC