Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): TIP #49 (Rejected): Change form-builder's spellchecker's default behavior

The spellchecker functionality built into the form builder has the spell checking functionality activated by default, causing a "Spell Check?" dialog to appear by every text area created through the form builder. The developer has to turn it off on a per-field basis with a "nospell" parameter to the widget.

I postulate -- based purely on empirical experience and on rants from fellow developers on #openacs -- that most often we DON'T want any spell checking done. The default "spell check" dialog becomes an annoyance in those cases.

I propose the spell checker's default behavior be changed to NOT spell check. The developer wanting spell check behavior would have to add a "spell" parameter to the widget it wants spellchecking done on.

However the decision on whether or not a textarea should have spellchecking available is made by developers.

Roberto,

There's a parameter in acs-templating that even a non-developer may operate called "SpellcheckFormWidgets". If you set it to "" all spellchecking will be disabled throughout the form builder forms. Thus there is no need to specify "nospell" all around the place!

That param currently doesn't default to "" but perhaps it should?

Do you think this would solve the issue or is there more to it that I'm missing?

(My thinking when I developed the spellchecker was that it probably would be more logical to globally enable  spellchecking in all the form widgets that were activated by the mentioned param and let the developer specify the exceptions to the rule than it would be to let him/her specify the ones where it should be enabled. But, of course, that is just a matter of taste, and I think I asked for the opinion of others, but maybe I didn't ...)

The concept Ola explained makes sense I think - enable spellchecking globally for certain widgets, e.g. textareas only, and disable it on case to case basis, assuming that most textareas are supposed to be filled with text that makes sense to spellcheck, whereas there are few textareas that are an exception to that and they would be easy to tag with :nospell.

I usually switch the spell checking feature off because I don't want to bother with setting it up correctly and I believe those who need it can as well activate spell checking on their browsers, but that's easy to do with the current parameter set up.