Re: [whatwg] Input and spell check/keyboard settings

Florian Rivoal wrote:
> If a text input field has lang=foo, and your system has a (virtual)
keyboard for language foo, I would expect that keyboard to be the one
presented to you.

The principle of least surprise argues against this.

Most mobile phones support many more languages and keyboard layouts than
their users know how to use.

Users typically configure layouts for which they have a use, and they learn
how to use then and switch between them.

Desktop operating systems include optional keyboard shortcuts for switching
languages. Most mobile devices include a globe or the ability to press and
hold the space bar to switch.

Some keyboards support multilingual input. Some are even smart enough to
perform spell checking against multiple languages.

But if I've only configured Hebrew and English and a web page has an input
with lang=ru or manages to specify an IME which is totally foreign to me,
I'm going to panic. (For the prototypical user anyway, I'm odd in that I've
probably used the input method before.)

> Same thing with IMEs (e.g. you have a US keyboard and a Japanese IME
installed on your desktop computer, when focusing a text input field with
lang=ja, I would expect the IME to be turned on).

On multi user desktops, the existence of IME support doesn't indicate that
all users of the computer are remotely comfortable with each IME.

> Not sure if any spec change is needed for that.

Keyboard layout and IME should be opaque to browser content, so this sort
of thing should be something where browser vendors are free to experiment
and discover that it's just not worth it (because language tagging is wrong
more often than it's right).

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2015 11:08:20 UTC