67208 - Incorporate Word Services Apple Event Suite

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Greg K.]

Mac OS provides a Apple Events Word Services Suite that allows such services as
spelling or grammar checkers or thesauri to service multiple other applications
that may require them.

It would be nice if users with such WS apps installed could activate them in
Mozilla's prefs and thus use them in all editing functions such as message and
page composition.

For information on Word Services, see "http://www.wordservices.org/Developers/".
 (Apparently this may also have ramifications for BeOS, but this enhancement
request strictly covers Mac OS.)

Comment 1

[rubydoo123]

moving to future until new feature work requests are reviewed, adding helpwanted 
 in keyword

Comment 2

[Kathleen :Brade]

-->brade

Comment 3

[Syd Logan]

spam composer change

Comment 4

[Michael D. Crawford]

Hi,

My name is Mike Crawford, I led the development of Word Services for both Mac OS
and BeOS, first as an employee of and then a consultant to Working Software,
http://www.working.com/

I have more lengthy comments about Word Services in Bug 58615 - to summarize, I
have been considering Word Services for *nix, and Word Perfect developed the
equivalent Writing Tools API for Windows.  It would be nice to have a single
protocol for all operating systems but there are practical problems with that.

A contact list for many (but not all) of those who have worked with Word
Services is at http://www.wordservices.org/Developers/contact.html  It's been a
long time since I've heard from many of them so I'll go ping them all and update
the page.

Comment 5

[timeless]

fwiw there's one macos spell checker excalibur iirc which has a huge number of
dictionaries available.

Comment 6

[Greg K.]

Yep, that's a Word Services app, too.

Comment 7

[Greg K.]

Mozilla for Mac OS 9 is no longer supported. FizzillaMach will get a spelling
checker in bug 86886.

Comment 8

[Michael D. Crawford]

I'd like to suggest that you still support Word Services.  My understanding is
that Word Services still works in OS X.  I know there's a problem with Working
Software's Spellswell, but I believe Excalibur works in OS X.  There's also a
version of Word Services for the BeOS.

Even if Mozilla will get a built-in spellchecker, I think it would be worthwhile
to support Word Services anyway because it will allow people to use their
preferred spellchecking UI and to share a single dictionary with other
applications.  Also there are other Word Services server applications besides
spellchecking, for example there is an HTML checker which would be directly
useful to users who use Mozilla to write web pages.

For a mostly complete list of Word Services server applications, see

http://www.mozilla.org/

Comment 9

[Michael D. Crawford]

oopsy, sorry that URL should have been

http://www.wordservices.org/

typing faster than I think.

Comment 10

[Greg K.]

That site no longer seems to exist to me.

Comment 11

[Michael D. Crawford]

Sorry, the domain expired.  Netsol hadn't notified me.  I just renewed it, it
should have name service again in a day or two.

Today is just not my day.

Comment 12

[Greg K.]

Reopening pending further consideration.

Comment 13

[Judson Valeski]

seemingly related: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260619

Comment 14

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

This refers to an obsolete product, and Firefox has since added its own spellchecker.