[webkit-dev] Supporting css ime-mode property

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

On 05.10.2010, at 17:16, Kenichi Ishibashi wrote:

> Here is another use-case. Some modern CJK web pages provide a way to
> input Chinese or Japanese text without OS-provided IMEs. You can see
> an example at http://www.baidu.com/. Click the text next to the search
> button and select 拼音 or appropriate one, then input text in the search
> box so you will get the candidate window in a similar way that
> OS-provided IMEs. When developers want to provide such feature, they
> might want to control system-level IMEs and the ime-mode property
> could provide the solution. I think this feature likely to change how
> people use the Web.

I'm not sure if I understand the exact use case. Are you saying that the page will want to suppress OS provided input methods if it does its own? That doesn't seem necessarily useful, and anyway, they don't need ime-mode for this - OS provided input methods won't be invoked if the page returns false from keydown event handler.

What I see on baidu.com right now seems much different from an input method though - they are just making a guess at what the user intended to type. Google search works exactly the same, as long as the page language is set appropriately. For Russian, it detects both typing with a wrong keyboard layout (if the user forgot to switch it), and transliteration. For Chinese, it supports at least transliteration. It also detects and corrects typos. All this functionality doesn't seem specific to CJK at all.

- WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov