12:59 am, 26 Aug 03
spelling is in the air
I spent a bunch of time reading docs to better understand the issues with loading modules a while back. I wanted to write a library—I was calling it “uspell”, the u for “unified”—that provided no spell-checking of its own and just had modules to support other spell-checking backends. Loadable modules solve the binary dependency problem: uspell depends on nothing, but uspell-module-aspell depends on aspell. There are spell checkers that attempt to unify languages (aspell supports quite a few) but ultimately the better spell checkers have language-specific logic for analyzing inflection/morphology.
The plan was to finish uspell, then use that as the backend for a new, better-thought-out GtkSpell.
Today I got mail from the Enchant developer, who has created a near-identical system to the uspell I had planned, and just tonight I got a patch to GtkSpell to use it. So I guess I don’t need to do anything, yet.
The plan, as before: finish LogJam release, first. Mustn’t start other projects.
The plan was to finish uspell, then use that as the backend for a new, better-thought-out GtkSpell.
Today I got mail from the Enchant developer, who has created a near-identical system to the uspell I had planned, and just tonight I got a patch to GtkSpell to use it. So I guess I don’t need to do anything, yet.
The plan, as before: finish LogJam release, first. Mustn’t start other projects.
Can you make LogJam notice that one of the single-quote characters was never closed and is thus probably an apostrophe?
This might sound overly anal, but since I've started using curly quotes myself I've become sensitive to them enough that the quote in “mustn't” looks totally wrong! :)
I don't much like the way it looks, either. :\
What?! That's completely backwards. The only reason we used apostrophes as quotes before is that we didn't have enough character positions in 7-bit ASCII to waste on the special quote characters.
Now that we've got many more character positions it makes sense for the quotes and the apostrophe to be at different character positions so that they don't have to share the same glyph.
I want to know what the person who made that decision was smoking. It also gets the honour of being added to my (currently small) list of “parts of specs I ignore because they are dumb”. Other members of that list include the deprecation of the HTML
MENU,DIRetc. elements and… I'm sure there was something else. It'll come back to me next time it's relevant, I'm sure.Of course, I don't expect you to ignore the spec in LogJam. My stupid spec boycott is a personal one which should not be forced on hapless users. :)