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.)

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

-->brade

spam composer change

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.

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

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

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

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/

oopsy, sorry that URL should have been http://www.wordservices.org/ typing faster than I think.

That site no longer seems to exist to me.

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.

Reopening pending further consideration.

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