Karl Fogel's blog
Lesson #2401:
When deploying text input forms on your web site, make sure to add your company’s name to the spell-checker dictionary, so it doesn’t get the jaggy red underline thingy when people type it:
No, I wouldn’t have thought of that either! But I’m going to try to remember it from now on. Is anyone maintaining a checklist for web designers somewhere? If so, please add this :-).
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That’s not your browser?
@David Glasser
My browser might be involved, but I thought that with all such text entry forms, the supplying server can send some javascript with a custom dictionary, or at least a supplementary dictionary. I mean, it’d be kind of crazy if that weren’t possible, considering that specialized vocabularies are the common case. (Also, ISTR having had to tweak one of those dictionaries in a .js file for a project I worked on in the last couple of years, though durned if I can remember where… oh, maybe http://code.google.com/p/nilmbugs/ ? The commit logs there might have something.)
Hilariously, the word “javascript” in this comment is getting the red jaggy underline too, by the way.
Well, are you invoking javascript with a custom dictionary? How did you add the company name to a dictionary without knowing where the dictionary is?
I’m not saying it’s not possible — clearly it is — but the default behaviuor is to let the browser handle spell checking. For example, my browser right now has no spell check feature, and I have no jaggy lines at all under any word in this comment, including Javascript. Nto vene thsee noes.
Yeah, I think the nilmbugs code is using some sort of custom heavyweight text entry box with all sorts of crazy formatting and such things built in, and Kickstarter is probably just using a straight-up TEXTAREA.
Something to propose for HTML5, maybe?
@Jed,
Well, I suspect the spec team has a lot of input already; I’m not sure this is worth the distraction cost for them.
I think that point is a point well worth mentioning, when using a spell checker most people disregard this, in fact some people like to make out their brilliant and deny they ever use a spell checker, but in reality all computer users know just how important a spell checker is 🙂