Spell checking, yet again, multiple dictionaries

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roedygr
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Spell checking, yet again, multiple dictionaries

Post by roedygr »

My website uses a number of "languages":

1. Canadian English ( colour, travelling )
2. US English ( color, traveling ), mostly in the many quotations from Americans
3. slang. Mostly in quotations. Outside that I consider it an error.
4. smatterings of French, German, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, along with a translation.
5. gibberish: strange text that should not be spell checked in any language, e.g. part numbers, unlinked URLs.

In each of these are embedded entities. My old workhorse SlickEdit editor
does not do UTF-8, so I can't code them directly. I find newer editors
are slow and clumsy by comparison.

What would be nice is for HTMLValidator to use an appropriate dictionary, and extras dictionary for each language and for it to treat entities as if I had coded the equivalent Unicode char.

How would the markup tell HTMLValidator which dictionary to use?

HTML5 has <span lang="en".

You could use:

ar=Arabic
de=German
en-CA=Canada
en-US=USA
en-x-slang=slang
en-x-none=gibberish
en=English
fr=French
fr-CA=French Canadian
he=Hebrew
la=Latin

see http://www.w3.org/International/article ... iew.en.php
the choice is wide.

For me, HTMLValidator is mainly for spell checking. My markup rarely fails because it is mostly computer-generated. It only fails when I am debugging changes to the generator programs.

I would like to easily toggle back and forth between checking markup, comments or both.
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roedygr
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Re: Spell checking, yet again, multiple dictionaries

Post by roedygr »

the other "gibberish" I currently mark with <span class="sic"> to mean that I am quoting something in error, and I don't want to accidentally fix it.
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Albert Wiersch
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Re: Spell checking, yet again, multiple dictionaries

Post by Albert Wiersch »

Hi Roedy,

I can look into this now to see if anything can be done for the next v15 update. If you are able to assist me with this by providing a simple example HTML document that demonstrates the problem and by testing any solution I may come up with, then please let me know.

However, the solution would be limited to the spell checking messages generated by CSE HTML Validator's own validator engine, since that has the most intelligence and is therefore more likely to have a workable solution. At this time I would not be able to make any modifications to the editor's live spelling feature unless there are English words that can be added to an extra included dictionary that comes with CSE HTML Validator.
Albert Wiersch, CSS HTML Validator Developer • Download CSS HTML Validator FREE Trial
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