[whatwg] Spellchecking mark III

Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
> My second sentence was trying to argument that page author has no
> business forcing the spellchecking on if the page author cannot force
> the spellchecking language! Especially for a case where the page
> contains a mix of multiple languages.

Not really. Consider e.g. flickr in which photos may be given titles, 
descriptions and comments in the language of the user's choice but the 
site UI is not localised. If flickr decided to do <input type="text" 
lang="en"> to get spellchecking to turn for photo titles then that would 
be much worse for the large number of non-native English speakers than 
<input type="text" spellcheck="on"> which would likely use the user's 
preferred dictionary (although this would be UA-dependent of course).

For another example, consider the case where I post on a Swedish forum 
in English, knowing that the general level of English in Sweden is 
excellent and in any case better than the level of my Swedish.

It doesn't seem reasonable to expect sites to always be localised or for 
  sites accepting multilingual user generated content to not exist. 
Therefore it seems totally conterproductive from the point of view of 
people communicating in less dominant languages to require spellchecking 
to be tied to language.

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 2009 02:35:21 UTC