Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

My attempt at real time spell checking in a web browser.

How about some background. Well, awu mentioned in a comment that he was reading this article. It's paints an interesting pictures of why Microsoft is scared of web applications, but that's not what I why I'm mentioning in the article. I liked the article because it has a list of 6 things you can't really do well in a web application:</p>

1. Create a fast drawing program
2. Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
3. Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
4. Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
5. Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
6. Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet

So I read the list as a challenge of things to do well in a web browser. Some of these things people are already making lots of progress (like keyboard-driven interfaces and warning users before losing work), so I decided to tackle spell checking (which hairylunch also makes mention of).

Anyway, you could have this on a blog for when you're adding a new post or adding a comment. There may be some issues with speed (due to the slowness of regular expressions) and there's a slightly more correct version here. That is, a version that handles HTML a bit better (remember that it's hard to remove HTML with regular expressions).

Update: Looks like Safari has this built into the browser. Wow, that's much more convenient than lots of server requests.

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[ jptrumptone ] ... [ Jun 17th - 3:02pm ]

Thats really cool! Are you going to try to give recommendation for spelling when you spell something wrong, like in the tip so it shows up when you hoover over a word?
-jp

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[ idealisms ] ... [ Jun 17th - 7:27pm ]

It's definitely possible (in a technical sense), but I wonder what type of impact that would have on bandwidth. Right now it's pretty good about sending short messages back about the misspelled words, if it were to give suggestions, it may not scale.

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