Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:59 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
...
But realistically, browsers won't "allow the user to easily override
it if they want to", because any interface for doing that would be
absurd.
...
I'm sure there are other people that know a lot more about UI design
than I do, who could come up with some really creative and usable.
The problem is not with which GUI controls you choose; it's with the
amount of attention demanded by the underlying situation. Spellchecking
would seemingly be turning itself off for a completely non-obvious
reason; and to make it obvious, you would have to make the spellchecking
feature more prominent than its importance permits.
That would happen with either the author specified attribute approach,
or the heuristics approach where browsers make an educated guess based
on the semantics and surrounding content.
The only way that wouldn't happen is if spell checking was completely
controlled by the user, so that it remains in the state it was last set
to for all controls; or defaults to being either on or off for every
control, regardless of what the user last specified. In thpse cases,
it's arguably more important for the spell checking control to be more
prominent in the UI.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/