View source for User:Cameron/Dictionary thoughts

Here's a collection of ideas regarding dictionaries that I pondered while I was away on holiday.

Basic page layout:

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Dictionaries allow you to spellcheck your work in online forms such as when blogging, writing webmail or using online forums. 

Dictionaries work with Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.1, and later.

We reckon you're probably looking for the English (British) dictionary.

* [https://releases.mozilla.org/etc/etc/ Install now - 200KB]

...or maybe you'd prefer one of these:

* [https://releases.mozilla.org/etc/etc/ English (Australian) - 218KB]
* [https://releases.mozilla.org/etc/etc/ English (Canadian) - 180KB]
* [https://releases.mozilla.org/etc/etc/ English (USA) - 190KB]

Or maybe we just have no idea at all, so here's the dictionaries for all languages:

<table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 90%;"><tr><th colspan="2">Language</th><th>Version</th><th>Size</th><th>Last Updated</th></tr>
<tr>
<td>Arabic</td>
<td lang="ar">عربي</td>
<td>0.1</td>
<td>726KB</td>
<td>May 8, 2006</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Basque</td>
<td lang="eu">Euskara</td>
<td>0.1</td>
<td>300KB</td>
<td>August 30, 2006</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>etc.</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

If you're still using Thunderbird 1.0 or 1.5 (and we strongly advise that you upgrade to 2.0) you can get the old-style dictionaries [http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/dictionaries.html here].

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The first guessed dictionary is the locale of the user's application installation if they are accessing the page from their app or if they are accessing it from a link, the first guessed dictionary is the one for the language they are browsing in.

The second-guessed locales are:
* The locales that the user has in their accept-language file, which I understand will be passed to us from the client's URL.
* Any locales which match the first part of the application's locale. eg. if the locale is en-GB, any en-* dictionaries will be shown.

Some database changes: 

Perhaps a new table called official-dictionaries which has the country/region code, a reference to the add-on's ID, and also the name of the language in the language. eg:
<table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>en-US</td><td>3497</td><td>English (American)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>de-DE</td><td>3077</td><td>Deutsch</td>
</tr>
</table>

Then we have an admin tool to add, edit and remove those references. I don't want people to just be able to upload any dictionary and have it appear on that page.

I'd also like to be able to change the compatibility info for all dictionaries at once with an admin tool, since they all use the same codebase.

If you hadn't gathered already, I don't like the match-by-em:id method, especially as it's not documented anywhere.

We'll need a way to change the existing dictionaries' add-on type - either during migration, or in the admin CP.

Not sure about how we'd go translating the language names into all other languages - it's different from translating an add-on's description (which we've made developers' responsibilities yeah?) so perhaps when we get the site localised we can localise a bunch of language names and hope for the best.