Jabber, Spell Check, Bot, Web page

Today's Freshmeat newsletter had a mention of Speller Pages, a JavaScript library for doing server-side spell checking. Adding it to your application involves adding a form button that calls a function when clicked which sends your text to the server, runs it through aspell, and draws a nice and tidy window to show you errors and suggest corrections.

I like it.

I tried to install something similar for Movable Type, MTSpeling, but only had marginal success. MTSpeling needs you to submit your text to the server before it can check it through, which makes the whole process tedious because you have to go through a lot of back and forth. You also can't act upon misspelled words directly (at least, I never got to the point where I could). You have to hit that back button and scan your way back through the text to the offending word.

Speller Pages would be a great addition to Movable Type. But I'd have to mess with Movable Type's guts, and even then I'd only end up with something that could be used with that application. I need something more agnostic, like IM.

I'd set up a script on my server which would masquerade as a Jabber user. Whenever I had spell checking needs, I'd either send that bot a URL or a block of text. If a URL, it would fetch it and strip out the HTML. It would take the text and send it to a spell checker on the server, then give me back the results. Misspelled words would have to be highlighted in red, possibly listed at the end of the text so you could ask the bot for suggested corrections. Or even perform your corrections by sending them over directly. In the end the bot would have to send you back the entire block of corrected text (assuming the correction happened within IM) for pasting back into your document.

Possible problems: long text will be less manageable in terms of copying and pasting and correcting than shorter text.

Possible extension: synonyms, antonyms, rhyming words. Thesaurus. Eventual support for AIM and other IM networks.

This could be a job for my aging PowerMac if there was a way to access dictionaries of some sort from within MacOS. I doubt it.

Benefits: spell checking available whenever you're connected to your IM client. Dramatic reduction in number of misspelled words per post.

I wonder if anyone ever made a grammar check that used the rules of The Elements of Style. That could be handy too, although I've never seen grammar checking software that was particularly useful.