On Dec 31, 2008, at 12:26 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 4:15 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com>
wrote:
2) The proposal Hixie linked seems way overengineered for this
purpose. First, it allows spellchecking to be explicitly turned on,
potentially overriding normal defaults, but that seems wrong; an
<input type="email"> should never spellcheck regardless of the page
author says. I can't see any valid use case for the author turning
spellchecking on regardless of UA defaults or user preferences.
It allows you to have a region of text where spellchecking is
disabled via the spellcheck attribute, but containing subregions
where spellchecking is enabled.
It seems to me you would have to have a lot of custom code to maintain
the boundaries between such regions during editing operations for this
to ever work right. Normal text editing would easily lead to text
moving across the boundaries. There would have to be strong motivating
examples to justify such a hard-to-use feature.
Second, it allows spellchecking to be controlled at a finer
granularity than editability, for which again I think there is no
valid use case. Both of these aspects make the feature more
complicated to implement and harder to understand, compared to just
having a way to only disable spellchecking at the same granularity
as editing.
A use case is editable program code, where spellchecking is
disabled, but where spellchecking is enabled inside comments. Maybe
that sounds a little far-fetched for today's Web applications, but
some IDEs (e.g. Eclipse) support this so it seems like something
we'd want in the future.
This sounds like a pretty ill-conceived feature. It is very common for
comments to include code, or fragments of code (such as variable
names) mixed with natural language. (I was unable to find any evidence
of spellchecking comments in the copy of Eclipse I downloaded, so I
can't comment on the details.)
Furthermore, other IDEs generally don't attempt to do this, and I
can't think of other application categories that would do something
similar.
So I don't think this makes for a very compelling use case. It's like
arguing for a page layout feature based on something only WordPerfect
does.
Regards,
Maciej