945933 - Disable spellchecking by default when autocorrect="off" in <textarea/>s

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, enhancement)

Description

[Nathan Phillip Brink (binki)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 SeaMonkey/2.22.1 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131113180422

Steps to reproduce:

Navigate to data:text/html,%3Ctextarea%20autocorrect%3D%22off%22%2F%3E


Actual results:

1. Right-click on the textarea and see that “Check Spelling” is ticked.
2. Enter gibberish into the textarea and see that red squiggly lines appear everywhere.


Expected results:

The textarea should have had “Check Spelling” unticked by default. Entered gibberish should not be flagged as incorrectly spelled.

Implementing this behavior would enable web forms annotated and optimized for iOS devices to display better in Mozilla-based browsers. These annotations can be helpful even in the desktop environment. For example, <input type="text" autocorrect="on"/> could (unlike it does now) have the “Check Spelling” option automatically ticked.

This would be a good addition to Mozilla’s existing heuristic in deciding whether or not to automatically tick “Check Spelling” which is, I believe, to do so for <textarea/> but not for <input type="text"/>. For example, a <textarea/> used for uploading SSH keys should not have “Check Spelling” ticked and such a field probably would have the autocorrect property set to "off". And an <input type="text"/> intended to hold a short phrase or word should have “Check Spelling” ticked and perhaps an author may have even set the autocorrect property to "on".

Apple’s documentation on the autocorrect property: https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/codinghowtos/mobile/userExperience/_index.html (click on the anchor with the text “correction” in it).

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The current spellcheck behavior is controlled by http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html#dom-spellcheck

which is the standards-compliant way to affect spellcheck behavior...

I suppose we could set the "default behavior" based on @autocorrect, though.