The deplorable state of spellchecker APIs from a front-end perspective.
Stop searching, you won’t find one that’s worth shit, and it’s the wrong approach.
For a few days now, I’ve been playing around trying to find a *reliable* cross-domain capable solution to provide word suggestions on a tweet box. This meaning, I needed a CORS-enabled or JSONP-enabled API that could provide at least two functionalities:
- A thesaurus endpoint, to get synonyms for a given user-inputed word found in a tweet.
- A spellchecker or google-like “did you mean” endpoint to make sure I send real words to the thesaurus.
( or ideally, one really cool thesaurus that does all that for me)
I strongly believe this should all be done in the front-end and be able to live on a static server in a simple index.html file, so I set off searching for an API to fulfill my needs.
My findings were a clusterfuck of shitty solutions where most implied loading up the whole thesaurus and dealing with fast-search algorithms (like I dont have enough problems). Those APIs that did at some point provide the functionality, like YAHOO for example, have been taken down. Others are archaic SOAP/WSDL-type APIs or XML crap. I really dont care about XML.
Google has one? Where. Show me those two endpoints I mentioned above.
But that’s not really the problem now is it? Both my browser and yours do this (and more) by leeching off of the underlying OS’s native APIs. When my browser puts those red squiggly lines underneath my words from now on you will hear me cursing out loud “why are you not exposed you bastard!”, because my current solution involves some furious brute-force-style promised AJAX pouding on a rate-limited API (bigup wordnik!) and that really sucks for them, for me and for the end user.
Judge for yourself:
- W3C (Oh great! A boolean!)
- YAHOO (see big red box)
- YAHOO Again (No definition found for Table search.spelling)
- Google (because everybody Loooooves SOAP for simplicity)
- Big Huge Labs (close but no spellcheck)
- Dictionary.com (Have not tried, didn’t find where to start)
- Spellerpages.sourceforge (PHP or Perl/CGI)
- And some funky people parsing the DOM to find the value in the “did you mean” element. Seriously. For realz. Yeah, I’d rather use…
- Bing (maybe, just thought about it)
UPDATE:
- Gladly, some people are better at expressing this than it am. Here’s to Hope.
- Chromium nightlys have SpellcheckRange
- If developing extensions in javascript, then typo.js is potentially cool.
The Alan-Alda-fication
The Alan-Alda-fication
| John Roderick: | When we were kids, the school curriculum was still based on the premise that we were trying to beat the Russians to the Moon. Even though we had already beat the Russians to the Moon, we were still reading those same math books. |
| Merlin Mann: | We, we wanted to get the Moon, and we wanted them NOT to get to the Moon. |
| JR: | Yeah, right, we wanted to get to the Moon and go, “IN YOUR FACE!” |
| MM: | Um-hmm |
| JR: | But then somewhere there in the Seventies, the ‘Alan Alda-fication of America’ happened, and suddenly everybody was an Artist. Nobody had a slide rule anymore, nobody was trying to get us to the Moon. Now everybody...now everybody was free to be... and we were all, our little hearts needed to be...set free.. and we needed to talk about our feelings... and everybody needed to share...and now we live in a nation of 350 million of the Most Important People Who Have Ever Lived. Nobody can wait in line. Nobody can admit for a second that maybe - in the Grand Scheme of Things - they...are...a PEON... |
| MM: | Um-hmm |
| JR: | ...and they need to STFU and get in line and do their jobs and get out of the way of better drivers who are on their way to some place, and only have nine minutes to get there. |
| MM: | I think I finally understand it: OK, it’s really, it’s a problem with at least two levels. The second level is that the people are in your way, they’re making it take way more than nine minutes, you’re not gonna get the chance to have a walk or a nap, they’re in John’s way. If I understand correctly, the first, much more broad problem - we’re never gonna get to problem two until we get through problem one - is that people are literally not being forced to literally listen to you. |
| JR: | Um-hmm. |
| MM: | Because that’s part of the problem...your...what you have to share with them is getting lost amidst all the voices and talking about feelings. Is that fair to say? |
| JR: | That is fair to say, except that - with the caveat - that I don’t really care if they’re listening, I just want them to be quiet while I’m talking. If they are just sitting there, just, just dumbly... |
| MM: | So it’s not really about the movie. The movie, really, the movie is You. The problem is they’re talking during You. |
| JR: | They’re talking during Me. |
We Are The World, For Everybody
MJ’s Version
There comes a time when we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
And its time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all
We can’t go on pretending day by day
That someone, somehow will soon make a change
We are all a part of Gods great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need
[Chorus]
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
Its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stones to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand
[Chorus]
When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe there’s no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one
[Chorus: x2]
My Proposal
There comes a time when we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
And its time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all
We can’t go on pretending day by day
That someone, somehow will soon make a change
We are all a part of Gods one great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need
[Chorus]
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
Its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and freeAs God has shown us by turning stones to bread
Mmm MMm mm mmm mm oooo yeah (note: open to suggestions)
So we all must lend a helping hand
[Chorus]
When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe there’s no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one
[Chorus: x2]
Access Control Freak(out)
Fuckin’ Tables Heh?
This is an opinion piece, for Sean, a colleague who is learning HTML.
On your journey, you will hear idiots swear by their semantic religion that everything you did is wrong. You will read articles telling you the piece of code you’ve spent days poking at only works in one browser and you will start over every single time to eventually fall on a blog post that tells you to do it exactly like you did in the first place. It’s a confusing world of vaguely justifiably lazy programmers versus manipulative semantic nazis, and you should embrace all that for what it is: passion for the medium (sometimes misplaced).
It’s now time for me to get pseudo-historical. The other day, I sent you an article I agreed with which attempts to dismiss our pursuit of semantic meaning as futile and pointless. I entirely agree with not bothering to use <section> and <aside> if a <div> works and gets you moving to the next step, but scores of historical records will prove: some semantics must remain and some things must never be done again.
Most notably: tables. Some will say they are meant for what they call “tabular data”, others will claim they serve no true purpose, yet all will agree: They are not mean for designing layouts. That’s how everything got fucked up in the 90s and why you needed a different browser for every website (I’m exaggerating just a wee bit here).
The table years happened, I think, because front-end developers generally sucked (still learning how to go from ANSI art to bitmaps) or were non existant. Some were programmers trying to do UI layout, looking for an easy way out and tables seemed like an excellent trending choice.
CSS was at version 1 but no one really bothered following standards because their bosses wanted to have the next best looking thing on the internet. In those days, you needed 1x1 pixel images to shim everything into place and fucking Internet Explorer would “fix” everybody’s code so you wouldn’t have to learn to do things right (read: according to standards).
Obviously not everyone sucked, otherwise we’d still be using table layouts. So the ones that didn’t suck: the more creative, explorative, curious and fearless ones, started evangelizing about standards and organizing themselves into movements and organisations. By doing this, they were teaching to CEOs, Marketers and upper-management that what they were doing (on the web) was all wrong and wouldn’t last a decade but most importantly: They were buying the front-end developers time to learn all the specs and giving them tools to fight back and say “I dont care that our website looks like Cleopatra’s shiny new castle, In the google’s eyes, it looks like a really shitty science report on the art of displaying crap products”.
Today, we see movements and organisations being setup to keep the original movements and organisations in check with the industry’s needs. It’s pretty confusing for any developer, and I dont think it will get any less confusing but table layouts are still definitely out of the question.
The only fine line left with tables, I believe, lies in our interpretation of “tabular data”. You can find massive flame wars on this topic with frequent applications of Godwin’s law.
In conclusion, my tip to you regarding tables would be that If you’re not using the <table> for controlling visual layout, then your usage is probably valid enough until you decide or learn that it’s not. But know that some things you can learn through W3C/WHATWG specification documents and others by trial and error, but some guidelines only history can teach us.
#table #layouts #neveragain
Über Movemberist
Would you google that WITH me please?
Often enough, people sitting in front of computers ask you stuff they could have just googled themselves. And almost always, a little shoulder devil tells you that you are angry about this. More specifically it whispers this in your ear: “why can she/he just google that her/himself, she/he’s sitting right in front of a computer!”
Well, let me be your little shoulder angel today, and maybe this message will transcend your entire being and become you. Maybe not. Most probably not. But maybe. Anyways, speaking strictly of the internet literate, here’s what I say:
You’re googling it with them not for them. The reason they’re asking is not because they can’t google it themselves, it’s because they want to extend their search capabilities by using your intrinsic expertise, your unique ability to be you and perceive things as you perceive things. subconsciously speaking of course, and all this in a matter of nano seconds. They would never admit to most of that. It leaves no trace.
On a tangent note, I ask my girlfriend a simple thing like “what’s the name of that singer” as a TV ad is playing. She starts up IMDB and I fire up a browser and start googling for hum… hummm… nothing. After having mumbled something along the lines of “well his brother’s dating this chick who’s in this movie blah blah blah” or whatever she suddenly goes “Paul Anka”!
Now how the heck could you have googled that? I sure couldn’t, I didn’t even remember what car brand the ad was about, yet she didn’t even need to know. Think about it. Seriously. Dude.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere. What’s my point? Simple observations, you decide.
see also: Let me google that for you http://lmgtfy.com
