- From: timeless <timeless@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 07:07:54 -0400
- To: Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>
- Cc: Chaals from Yandex <chaals@yandex-team.ru>, Jonny Rein Eriksen <jonnyr@opera.com>, WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
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