The new version 2.0 of the (Mozilla) Firefox web browser supports
spell checking in web forms. This is a new feature with some
obvious deficiencies that might be improved in coming versions.
Has there been any discussion, proposal or attempts to adopt
Firefox' spell checker to Wikipedia's needs? Currently, wiki
syntax is not recognized, and the language needs to be set
manually. If I go to
nl.wikipedia.org and click edit, I want the
browser to automatically select the Dutch spelling dictionary.
And there is no need to apply spell checking to interwiki links,
external URLs, template names or template parameter names.
Perhaps the website needs to communicate this to the browser by
some tags to the HTML, e.g. <textarea lang=nl syntax=mediawiki>?
Currently the language support in Firefox is only a spell checker.
As a comparison, OpenOffice also offers automatic corrections (if
I type "abotu", this can automatically be corrected to "about"),
hyphenation, and a thesaurus. I have no idea what is planned, but
I guess these features will eventually creep into Firefox too.
One option offered by the interaction between browser and website
is that the spelling dictionary could be maintained and updated
online. For example, if I spell "abotu", a word not found in the
browser's built-in dictionary, the browser could send a request to
Wiktionary (-Z) for advice on that word. This option is not so
obvious to developers of OpenOffice as it should be to developers
of Firefox. This opens up a new can of legal worms: Should
Wiktionary offer spelling help only for documents that are
released under a free license?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se