12.6 The Attributes “contenteditable” and “spellcheck” 289Figure 12.5 Editing a page with the spell checker in Firefox 3.6
The screen shot in Figure 12.5 shows how misspelled words as well as unknown
words are indicated with red wavy lines. The context menu allows you to switch to
another language, install new dictionaries, and even correct mistakes by choosing
from suggestions. Unknown words can also be added to a personal dictionary.
In Firefox, personal dictionaries are located in the user’s profile folder and are
named persdict.dat. Even though the file extension suggests otherwise, these
files are pure text documents with one word per line. Unfortunately, entries from
personal dictionaries are not yet listed during correction, at least with Firefox 3.6.
At the time of this writing, no browser had implemented the spellcheck attribute
without errors. It seems that browsers view all text areas of a page as natural
candidates for spell checking and always allow checking in the context menu
without taking into account the spellcheck attribute. The attempt to exclude the
CSS code from spell checking via spellcheck=false was unsuccessful in all of the
browsers tested.
Figure 12.6 shows that not only text components, but also CSS styles and even
images can be made editable.