[webkit-qt] Spellchecking support for WebKit2

[Simon Hausmann]

On Thursday, January 10, 2013 11:59:21 AM Jose Dapena Paz wrote:
> El mar, 08-01-2013 a las 14:17 +0100, Simon Hausmann escribió:
> > My feeling is that from an API perspective spell checking should simply
> > work out of the box if it's supported by the underlying platform. I do
> > hope that we'll get a spell checking API into Qt at some point and
> > libenchant looks indeed promising for Linux.
> 
> In fact I'm adding support for spellchecking at webkit level, as this is
> the requirement here, it is already supported at webkit internals, and I
> just need to expose the needed bits of it at application level. I also
> need a way to integrate more spellcheckers than just enchant. So I'm
> trying to do the minimum API needed for my requirements.

Excellent.
 
> But for me it is obvious that adding support at toolkit level, and then
> make any Qt stock editing widget/component be able to use it would be
> quite interesting. At WebKit level, we would then just use Qt API as the
> default implementation for text checking.

Sounds good. It can be done in increments after all, i.e. use a library 
directly in WebKit first and later maybe a component/API from the toolkit.
 
> > As a developer I don't want to have to make a choice about which API to
> > use or implement my own spell checker. But I may want to configure a few
> > settings perhaps (which ones?) and I think I want to have full control
> > over the UI.
> Typical UI case (you can find settings for this in at least firefox and
> chrome):
> * Being able to enable/disable spell checking.
> * Choose the set of languages to do spell checking. But it defaults to
> user desktop language. To do this you need to know the spell check
> engine supported languages and have a way to set them.

Right, _this_ is where we may have to make a distinction between toolkit level 
support or not. If not, then we do need a API on the WebKit level. If it's 
minimal then we can also add it there first and later make it delegate to the 
toolkit implementation.

In general it seems to me that as a developer _embedding_ WebKit I don't want 
to have to make a choice about which spell checking _engine_ to use. Therefore 
I think that part should be left out from the API.

Simon