How about including a grammar kit with features like spellcheck and maybe a grammar check that applications could call? The dictionaries installed for each language would be system wide, meaning that if user added a new word through one application it would appear in other apps.
I think it would be very neat to be able to right-click in the text area in a browser and run a spell check on its content.
Not sure about grammar (that’s pretty tough to get working correctly–most languages to my understanding are too complex in all of their nuances to be really computer-grammar-checkable), but a spelling/word kit was discussed at WalterCon. I think it was pretty unanimous as far as support went. We’d all love to be able to right-click a file in any app’s textbox and have suggestions, not to mention a universal spelling DB so that you don’t have to add it in every program that includes its own functionality, like the way things are now. Other suggestions included the ability to look up on dictionary.com and thesaurus.com and the like with one click from anywhere.
Kev
I think a spelling kit would be useful since you could easily supply it with different dictionary files, a grammar kit would be significantly harder to do… perhaps they should do a separate spell kit and grammar kit so that the implimentation of one doesn’t stall the implementation of the other.
I’ve often felt that it would be nice to have both a global dictionary (like Kev) described, and also a file/app specific one so that you can reject all those words that are really .tex markup, etc… but still have your word processor/email client mark those as dodgy. Maybe this could be stored as meta-information in the BFS, for those files that have an “ignore” list.
Hey, good thinking! I hadn’t considered that before.
Kev